Transaction Processing

As both a card issuer and payment card network, Discover Financial Services is feeling the sharp pinch of recession. Discover chief executive David Nelms indicated to analysts on Thursday that Discover would play a conservative game on the issuing side in 2009, but not necessarily so on the merchant side. …

A mobile-payments startup called Paymo Inc., which launched this week with service in 39 countries, hopes to succeed in what has turned out to be a tough market: micropayments for digital content. The San Francisco-based company has more than 300 merchants approved to accept payments on its platform, says Terry …

Largely confirming what it projected in late November, point-of-sale terminal provider VeriFone Holdings Inc. says North American business from independent sales organizations and merchant processors was off in the fiscal fourth quarter ended Oct. 31, and prospects for fiscal 2009 aren't much better. San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone eked out a …

At a time of rising business failures and intense industry competition, United Bank Card Inc. says its new Harbortouch unit is producing what the big independent sales organization sought?enhanced merchant relationships and higher margins. In addition to card processing, Harbortouch offers small and mid-sized restaurants and retailers business-management hardware and …

While most attention in e-commerce is focused on enabling payments for Web sites run by major chains, airlines, and other hard-goods merchants and sellers of high-end services, some processors have begun to carve out stakes in a corner of online commerce that doesn't get as much notice?digital goods. This week, …

Merchants are getting the message that they should not store credit and debit card data, but that's turning into yesterday's issue, according to Chicago-based Trustwave, one of the big card-industry security consultancies. In a report released on Monday, Trustwave says that computer hackers may still be able to steal card …

The steady march toward more secure payment-processing software is likely to force many?possibly thousands?of small software vendors out of the market of serving merchants and card processors. These vendors will find it too expensive to upgrade their existing point-of-sale and related applications to meet specifications set forth in the new …

As many as one-third of U.S. financial institutions could within the next two years adopt a technology that allows customers at home to convert paper checks into imaged deposits that can be transmitted to the bank via online-banking links. The strongest interest in this so-called consumer-capture capability is likely to …

In another sign of sweeping changes in the Canadian payment card market, Visa Inc.'s Visa Canada unit last week published interchange rates on its Web site for the first time. The posting comes at a time when merchants are complaining about higher rewards-card acceptance costs and expressing fears that possible …

The torrent of press releases promoting this new mobile-banking technology or that new mobile-banking service usually references, either implicitly or explicitly, the consumer as the end user. But small businesses represent a far more receptive user group for mobile-banking services, including bill payments, according to a new report from Boston-based …