Pricing

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 3 (Editor's Note: In its November-December 2006 issue, Digital Transactions magazine began a series of special analytical reports concerning the 10 most critical issues now confronting banks, processors, and merchants as they engage in handling electronic transactions. Written by noted researcher and …

Statistics released on Monday indicate the trafficking of electronic check images among banks took big strides in 2006. With December numbers in, The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, New York, which operates the nation's largest image-exchange network, reported its volume last year totaled 747 million images, representing $2 trillion in …

Checks cleared by paying banks as electronic images outnumbered substitute checks for the first time in the short history of image exchange in October, according to numbers compiled by the Electronic Check Clearing House Organization, Dallas. The ECCHO statistics, gathered from three primary settlement networks, also show healthy growth in …

Digital content like video, games, and music delivered as part of cell-phone subscriber plans may be getting plenty of attention these days, but it's turning out to be a harder sell than many mobile-commerce enthusiasts had thought. Some 72.5% of respondents in a survey of more than 2,500 U.S. wireless …

First came PayPal Inc., then Google Inc.'s Checkout service. Now MODASolutions, an Ottawa-based company that lets consumers pay e-retailers as if they were paying any other online bill, is offering incentives tied to the holiday-shopping season to promote alternative ways to pay online. But in MODASolutions' case, its SECURE-eBill service …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s decision to accept MasterCard Worldwide credit cards?but not credit cards from Visa USA–at its 500-plus Sam's Club stores stems from competitive forces in the warehouse retailing business, but may also signal the beginning of the end of uniformity of merchant acceptance of the two bank card brands. …

In another indication that the days may be numbered for premium short-message service (SMS) as the dominant mobile-commerce payment channel, some 65% of executives in the entertainment, media, mobile, and broadband industries surveyed at a recent conference agreed that payments handled as direct charges by operators' billing systems will be …

Check processor Solutran Inc. thinks it has found a way to make the new back-office conversion (BOC) e-check code more attractive to merchants: take the costly scanning process out the back office and outsource it. Plymouth, Minn.-based Solutran recently announced its SPIN service, for Solutran POS and Imaging Network. The …

Reporting results for its first full quarter as a publicly held company, MasterCard Inc. on Wednesday released statistics showing significant gains for its U.S. debit card brand. Signature-debit cards accounted for 1.39 billion point-of-sale transactions in the third quarter, a 62% jump over volume in the year-ago period. The product …

With credit and debit cards accounting for nearly 46% of supermarket payments, card-acceptance fees now rank No. 2 behind energy costs among the top concerns of grocery-store executives, the Food Marketing Institute reports in its latest financial review of the grocery industry's financial health. In its 2005-2006 Annual Financial Review …