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Add-on pricing as well as an increase in manual items kept the fees banks and independent sales organizations pay to processors from dropping in 2004, according to a new acquirer-pricing study released today. Although most observers thought processor fees might decline somewhat last year as a result of the emergence …
Read More »Mobile-Gaming Boom May Force Changes in Mobile Payments
The booming market for mobile games is set to overtake that for ring tones as the largest digital-content market in m-commerce, with carrier-based billing remaining the dominant payment model for the foreseeable future. According to the most conservative projection offered by experts speaking this week at a conference on the …
Read More »First Data Won’t Be the Last Processor to Certify with Discover
First Data Corp. may have become the first third-party processor to achieve certification on Discover Financial Services Inc.'s network, but it almost certainly won't be the last as the card company uses its newly won freedom to win over issuers of the bank card brands, according to the top executive …
Read More »PassMark Goes Commercial, Signs up First Customer
A Woodside, Calif.-based startup company today began commercial production of a two-factor authentication system for Internet transactions and also announced its first customer for the product. PassMark Security LLC, which was founded last year, has sold its PassMark identification system to Stanford Federal Credit Union, Palo Alto, Calif. The 18-year-old …
Read More »A BioPay-Pay By Touch Patent Tiff Takes a New Twist
A simmering patent feud between rival biometric transaction processors BioPay LLC and Pay By Touch has taken another twist with Pay By Touch's acquisition of a patent covering check-cashing services, BioPay's core business. In a news release it issued last week, Pay By Touch claimed its competitor had tried to …
Read More »Discover Processing Deal Caps Year of Gains for First Data
First Data Corp., which spent much of last year integrating its massive acquisition of Concord EFS Inc., has picked up another potentially huge source of transaction volume by winning the processing business for the new Wal-Mart/Discover card announced last week. As a result of the agreement, the Denver-based transaction-processing giant …
Read More »Why ClearCommerce Opted to Join Forces with eFunds
ClearCommerce Corp.'s hopes to better its chances of winning business by becoming part of a publicly held company played a major role in its decision to merge with eFunds Corp., according to a senior executive at ClearCommerce. The Austin, Texas-based provider of transaction gateway and anti-fraud services to Internet merchants …
Read More »ReD Beefs up Technology to Combat Growing Swarms of Fraudsters
E-commerce gateway Retail Decisions Inc. has announced enhancements to its anti-fraud technology that will, among other things, cut the number of transactions online retailers must refer for manual review by up to 30%. The Hazlet, N.J.-based operating unit of U.K.-based Retail Decisions PLC has integrated neural-networking technology called Prism and …
Read More »Eye on ISOs: First American/NDFC, iPayment, Wireless News
Two key results of First American Payment Systems L.P.'s acquisition of National Data Funding Corp.?consummated late last year and announced last week?are that First American gains an inhouse facility for wireless, Internet Protocol-based transaction processing while R. Scott Hatfield, one of NDFC's long-time owners, can now devote himself full-time to …
Read More »PayPal Says It Will Stop Blocking of Payments Backed by Credit Cards
PayPal Inc. has announced it will no longer allow sellers that have bank accounts registered with the San Jose, Calif.-based processor to block payments funded by credit cards, effective next month. Sellers' ability to refuse such payments has been part of the company's “Payment Receiving Preferences” policy for so-called premier …
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