Transactors ‘We’re Betting on the Gesture of Tapping’John Stewart By building bridges between the online and offline worlds, Bling Nation hopes to popularize ‘tapping in’ at merchants. It’s all about going viral, says one of the mobile-payments startup’s top executives. Scarcely two years old, Bling Nation Ltd. has already deployed …

A new data-security service announced on Tuesday by heavyweight players in payment processing and data security?First Data Corp. and EMC Corp.'s RSA unit, known as The Security Division of EMC?is expected to boost a technology called tokenization, the replacement of cardholder account numbers with surrogate numbers or “tokens.” Since the …

The end-to-end encryption train picked up steam on Tuesday when big merchant acquirer RBS WorldPay Inc. said it would use point-of-sale terminal developer VeriFone Holdings Inc.'s VeriShield Protect technology. The announcement is significant because RBS WorldPay is the first acquirer to publicly disclose it is using the system VeriFone unveiled …

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 …

San Jose, Calif.-based point-of-sale terminal developer VeriFone Holdings Inc.'s outspoken chief executive, Douglas G. Bergeron, sought in an analysts' conference call Tuesday to make hay out of the current concern about cardholder data security stemming from recent breaches at retailers such as TJX Cos. (Digital Transactions News, March 29). Older …

Recent cases of card-data theft from retailers?and the publicity surrounding them?are apparently generating opportunity for startup security-software companies. “More and more retailers are looking for ways to prevent breaches,” says Mark Buczynski, vice president of marketing at BitArmor Systems Inc., a 4-year-old, Pittsburgh-based company that markets encryption software it has …

Although many details remain unclear, a security breach at a big supermarket chain in the Northeast bears some resemblance to a sophisticated rigging of point-of-sale equipment to capture PINs and other card data last year in Canada. Quincy, Mass.-based Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos., which has 385 stores in New …

Morgan Stanley's Discover Financial Services LLC payment network on Tuesday announced its certification of a contactless card reader from On Track Innovations Ltd., Discover's second such announcement in three months. But Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover still hasn't revealed its larger contactless plans. “There's nothing we can talk about right now,” a …

In the latest of its so-called Data Security Alerts aimed at strengthening merchant payment card security, Visa USA is putting the spotlight on point-of-sale systems that provide electronic on-ramps for fraudsters. In particular, Visa wants merchants to remedy the vulnerabilities of what it calls “improperly segmented network environments.” Merchants can …

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 …