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Visa Inc. has kicked breached merchant acquirers Heartland Payment Systems Inc. and RBS WorldPay Inc. off of its list of processors compliant with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI. That action sent the acquirers to a netherworld known as probation and triggered a debate in the payments industry …
Read More »Acquirers Enlarge the AmEx and Discover Merchant Networks
American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services both report that enlisting bank card acquirers to grow their merchant networks is paying off. Until their initiatives started, merchants had to deal with separate customer-service staff and received separate statements for their respective AmEx or Discover accounts. That made taking brands more …
Read More »Heartland to Release Breach News?Though When It Can’t Say
Heartland Payment Systems Inc. will be releasing additional information on the recent data breach of one of its payment-processing platforms, though “I can't tell you how soon,” says Robert Carr, Heartland's chief executive. The Princeton, N.J.-based merchant acquirer in January announced that malicious software, or malware, had been secretly planted …
Read More »Why the Fed Is Moving to Same-Day Clearing for E-Checks
Looking to speed up clearing time for electronic checks on the automated clearing house, The Federal Reserve Banks on Monday announced the first change to the settlement windows for the ACH network in 35 years. The change, which is set to take effect in the second quarter of next year, …
Read More »New Products Could Spur Holdouts to Jump into Image Exchange
Viewpointe Archive Services LLC this week introduced two products that, the company says, respond to rising volumes of imaged checks and could smooth the way for more financial institutions to participate in end-to-end image exchange. One of the products catches mismatches between check images and the data contained in associated …
Read More »Push for Deposits Lends Impetus to Consumer And Mobile Capture
Yet another banking industry vendor, NCR Corp., is entering the consumer-capture marketplace. But as the field of providers gets more crowded, financial institutions are struggling to get a decent return on technology that enables consumers to make images of and deposit checks from their homes, according to an industry analyst. …
Read More »No Confirmation So Far for Multiple Reports of Another Breach
Reports of yet another merchant-acquirer data breach are speeding around the Internet, but the card networks have not confirmed them publicly. Nor has any processor been identified. Merchant-acquiring sources, however, tell Digital Transaction News that multiple processors may have been breached in recent months. The non-profit Open Security Foundation, an …
Read More »New Banking Group Aims at Smoothing out Image-Exchange Process
A new, eight-member banking group that is working to smooth out the remaining kinks in image exchange, the process by which paper checks can be turned into images and settled electronically, has released four recommendations and is working on another eight. The Image Industry Interoperability Group, or i3G as it …
Read More »ACH Bill Payments Shine As Other E-Checks Dim with Check Decline
Internet bill payments were the star performers among the established electronic-check payment options during the fourth quarter, according to figures released Wednesday by the governing body of the automated clearing house. NACHA reports that transaction volume on its WEB e-check code, the code for online transactions such as bill payments, …
Read More »More ID Fraud Cases Stem from Data Breaches, Report Says
The good news about identity fraud: dollar losses per incident are going down. The bad news: incidents are up. The bad news for merchants: fraud victims, especially young adults, will punish merchants they associate with ID fraud. And some bad news for the payments industry in general: more ID fraud …
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