Transaction Processing

With the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act (Check 21) taking effect today, Metavante Corp. hopes to use its latest acquisition in the payments business to help it leverage sales to banks for distributed check capture and move the two national check image exchanges that have gone live so …

PayPal Inc. may have made headlines last week with its intermittent outages, but third-quarter numbers released this week by its parent company, Internet auction kingpin eBay Inc., show the online payments processor racking up significant growth in accounts, transactions, and dollar volume, while continuing to chop fraud losses. San Jose, …

The Web site for specialty charge card issuer Diner's Club scored 100% reliability and topped a new weekly test of both reliability and response time at nine credit card Web sites. The Diner's site posted a response time of 7.03 seconds, significantly ahead of the second-place site, Capital One (8.20 …

Metavante Corp. continues to pursue an aggressive acquisition strategy in electronic payments with it announcement today that it agreed to buy VECTORsgi, a software company in Addison, Texas, that sells check-imaging software. The acquisition, valued at $100 million in cash plus another $35 million to be paid if certain targets …

MasterCard International announced today it will launch pilots of its PayPass electronic payment system on mobile phones from Motorola Inc. The Purchase, N.Y.-based card company says the pilots will get under way at a “variety” of unspecified locations in the U.S by the end of the year. The Motorola phones …

PayPal Inc. late this afternoon says it is making headway against the software glitch that has plagued its Web site since Friday, rendering it inaccessible at times for both buyers and sellers who use the PayPal electronic payment system. “We made progress today, and we've got eBay and PayPal technical …

A veteran ATM network executive thinks he can succeed at building a national health-care transaction-processing system, though similar efforts have a dismal record of failure. The executive, Joseph E. Wolfson, founder of the Metroteller electronic funds transfer network, expects the HealthTransaction Network to begin processing transactions from health-care insurance companies …

Albertson's Inc., a Boise, Idaho-based chain of supermarkets, will install and test a biometric-based system to authenticate electronic transactions by the end of the first quarter next year. The system, which relies on mathematically derived templates of consumers' fingerprints, comes from San Francisco-based Pay By Touch, which has been aggressively …

With the effective date for the Check Clearing for the 21st Century (Check 21) Act only 22 days away, few electronic payments observers doubt that the efficiencies of check imaging and image exchange will benefit banks. A lingering question, though, has been how much it will benefit retailers who accept …

Authorize.net, which has been the victim of a series of denial-of-service attacks since Sept. 15, says today it has implemented unspecified “industry-leading solutions” that are thwarting the assaults on its data centers, which process card transactions for more than 100,000 merchants. It also says its engineers from the start of …