Technology

It sounds counterintuitive: USAA Federal Savings Bank's customers will soon access a more-secure mobile banking service by entering less information.

First National Bank of Omaha plans to relinquish controlling interest in its First National Merchant Solutions merchant-acquiring arm to Total System Services Inc. in a joint venture the companies announced today.

Mocapay Inc., a Denver-based mobile loyalty and gift card technology company, last week unveiled a platform enabling merchants to give customers a one-time authorization code to conduct point-of-sale payments from prepaid accounts using mobile handsets.

First Data Corp. hopes to raise the stakes among payment-terminal makers and processors vying to encrypt cardholder data with a new product it contends goes further than other market offerings.

Though a few large merchants fail to achieve compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, many rely on alternative compensating controls to comply, according to a report released today by Thales Group and the Ponemon Institute. Many large merchants also are paying an average of $225,000 per year for PCI audits, according to the report.

Five years ago, biometric payments seemed ready for the American mainstream. Backers predicted that financial institutions and retailers soon would use fingerprint, palm, vein, iris or facial scans to verify consumers’ identities for ATM and point-of-sale transactions.

Small business owners do not expect any major improvement in the economy in the next few months, according to data from Discover Financial Services.

Citigroup Inc. is evaluating a new mobile service that monitors where people do their shopping, but has no actual banking functions.

Bottomline Technologies said Wednesday that it has agreed to purchase Bank of America Corp.'s travel commission payments service.

Cardtronics USA Inc. announced Wednesday it has signed a long-term managed-services contract with Pacific Convenience & Fuels LLC, Cardtronics third such deal in less than a month.