The costs of air miles and other perks and rewards account for 44% of bank card interchange, while card issuers' cost of funds and profit margins take 35%, and network branding efforts account for 3%, according to a new report issued this week. Just 13% of the acquirer-paid fee goes …

It may be as rare as an ivory-billed woodpecker, but the merchant that accepts Visa without also accepting MasterCard or vice versa is not extinct in the United States. Within the past week, discount retailer Dollar General Corp. announced it would accept Visa credit and check (signature-debit) cards but not …

While many bankers and industry experts lament the continuing rise in volume of so-called substitute checks, the paper documents most banks require for clearing of items that had been converted into electronic image files, newly available industry data indicate the number of checks cleared as electronic images is rising even …

Contactless payments loom large among rising challenges now confronting even the most dominant processors in the U.S. merchant-acquiring business, according to a new study. The report estimates that acquirers processed 45.5 billion credit, prepaid, and signature-debit transactions in 2005, a huge electronic transactions market it says is controlled by five …

It doesn't go live until next March 16, yet the new back-office conversion (BOC) electronic-check payment option already is attracting a good deal of interest from payment processors and their customers looking to reduce volumes of paper checks and speed customer service. “We believe this new conversion code will definitely …

Debit cards continue to find favor with consumers for point-of-sale purchases, results of the latest annual payments survey by First Data Corp.'s Star electronic funds transfer network shows. And recent security breaches involving PIN-based debit cards don't yet seem to have dented PIN debit's popularity. According to Star's 2005/2006 Consumer …

Relying in part on its recently completed acquisition of Princeton eCom Corp., Online Resources Corp., Chantilly, Va., plans to roll out a real-time expedited payments service for its banking-client base by the first quarter of next year, Matthew P. Lawlor, chief executive of the company, tells Digital Transactions News. The …

Discover Financial Services LLC's new merchant-processing pact with leading payment processor First Data Corp. that involves small and mid-sized merchants is just the first of more deals Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover plans to strike with big merchant acquirers to expand acceptance of the No. 4 card brand while simultaneously reducing costs. …

The product has been available for only two weeks, but Google Inc.'s online payment service has already won considerable favor with at least some Internet merchants and companies that process online transactions. Meanwhile, some analysts caution that even if Google Checkout, the online search giant's name for its long-expected entry …

Ebay Inc.'s decision to bar Google Inc.'s new payment product from its massive online auction site doesn't seem to faze the online search company. Indeed, the executive in charge of Google Checkout, which debuted less than two weeks ago (Digital Transactions News, June 29), tells Digital Transactions News Google has …