News

January, 2004

• 12 January

  Peppercoin Scores Another Online Song Merchant

  Peppercoin Inc., the Waltham, Mass.-based provider of software to process very small online transactions like payments for 99-cent songs, has signed up another new client in the red-hot market for online music. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a non-profit record label belonging to the Smithsonian Institution, announced it had signed on with …
• 12 January

  Pay By Touch Gets a Boost with Its IBM Alliance

  Pay By Touch, a San Francisco-based company offering a biometrics-based technology that allows consumers to pay at the point of sale without presenting a card, keyfob, token, or any other payment medium, announced today that it has formed an alliance with IBM Corp. that should give the fledgling biometrics company …
• 9 January

  Continental’s Kiosk Network Reaches All U.S. Airports It Serves

  Continental Airlines has announced it has now installed ticketing kiosks in all domestic airports served by its planes. With a machine going online Dec. 31 at the airport in Reno, Nev., the airline's network of machines now numbers 779 across 130 U.S. airports. Continental says self-service check-in has become the …
• 9 January

  A New Study Documents a Breakthrough Year for Debit Cards

  Debit cards were hot in 2003, and research released this week shows just how hot. A study conducted by Boston-based Dove Consulting says the number of consumers using debit cards tied to personal identification numbers to make purchases in stores rose in 2003 to 57%, up from 48% in a …
• 8 January

  Gomez Finds Web Transactions Held Up Well During the Holiday Crush

  Response times and success rates for transactions on retailers' Web sites varied somewhat during the crush of the recent holiday shopping season, but for the most part transaction performance held up pretty well, according to a report released today by Gomez Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based company that measures Internet performance. …
• 6 January

  Credit Card Delinquencies Didn’t Faze Holiday Shoppers

  The highest delinquency rate ever seen on credit cards did little to dampen transactions on the cards during the critical holiday season. The American Bankers Association reports today that late payments on credit cards reached a record 4.09% of all accounts in the third quarter of 2003, up from 4.04% …
• 6 January

  Suit Settled, eBay and Tumbleweed Target Online Security

  Tumbleweed Communications Corp. hopes to move forward with eBay Inc. and its PayPal person-to-person transaction unit on solutions for online transaction and e-mail security issues now that the companies have settled patent-infringement lawsuits Tumbleweed initiated in May and September 2002. In the suits, filed originally against PayPal and then against …
• 5 January

  Cash Asserts Itself at Continental Airlines

  Hold the requiem for cash. It's still flexing its muscles as a payment vehicle, as witness the deal announced today by Western Union Financial Services Inc. and Continental Airlines. Starting now, customers who book seats on the airline's Web site can pay by cash at any of 45,000 Western Union …
• 1 January

  Record Online Spending Brings Record Strains

  The record transaction volume recorded online this holiday shopping season also put record strains on Web sites' ability to handle the load. According to data from Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based site-performance management company, both response time and success rate for Web transactions improved in the week ending …

December, 2003

• 29 December

  iPayment Looks to Agent Banks for Growth

  Nashville, Tenn.-based independent sales organization iPayment Inc. expects on Wednesday to close on its $55 million cash acquisition of an agent-bank portfolio from First Data Corp. The portfolio consists of 18,000 small merchant accounts controlled by 170 agent banks and generating about $4 billion in annual card volume. First Data …