Data and information management

Security breaches at trusted global corporations, such as Target and eBay are becoming a regular occurrence. Valuable customer data serves as a new currency of sorts for fraudsters, prompting the digital underground to stage well thought out attacks on a scale previously unheard of.

The newly rebranded Visa Checkout is the latest of the card network's attempts to create a more streamlined, digital payment process that moves past the plastic card. Visa and Visa Europe have embarked on many projects around the globe in recent years, targeting e-commerce, mobile payments, P2P and other use cases.

The Justice Department's Operation Choke Point isn't really about combatting fraud, says Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association. Federal regulators simply don't like high-risk merchants, such as payday lenders and guns dealers, he says.

The banking industry is pushing back against a plan released this week by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to publicize more details about consumers' individual complaints about financial companies.

WEX, a corporate payments company, has closed its acquisition of Evolution1, a Fargo-based firm that produces software to manage health care transactions.

eBay's two most "extraordinary events" from the first half of the year were a now-resolved conflict with activist investor Carl Icahn and a cyber-attack that created financial headwinds. It is not yet actively searching for a new PayPal president.

Wells Fargo's process of establishing new cross-border remittance corridors creates a vital network effect, helping the bank withstand the country-specific problems that are driving rivals out of the business.

ProPay, a subsidiary of the processor Total System Services (TSYS), is working with ThreatMetrix to offer fraud prevention technology to its customers.

Security breaches exposing consumers' personal information are becoming larger and more frequent in New York, costing businesses more than $1.37 billion last year, the state attorney general's office said.

Trustwave is promising to stop any data hacking attempts against a client made through a Web browser, but the tradeoff is the client has to give Trustwave hands-on control of its Web security.

Affirm, which launched in early 2013 with a product that resembles a digital version of a charge card, is making its payment schedules more flexible in an effort to attract more merchants and consumers.

A new malware botnet is using thousands of compromised computers to launch attacks on point-of-sale systems with the intent to steal card data, says a warning from security company FireEye.

Apple Inc. has not joined the Faster IDentity Online Alliance and its quest for more secure online authentication, but the technology giant has played a significant role in helping develop the foundation for new standards.

When even a millennial with a six-figure income and a 750 FICO score can't snag a loan with a decent interest rate, there's something wrong with the system.

Wallaby Financial has hired Scott Grimes to be senior vice president of risk and operations, a new position for Wallaby, which sells mobile and web-based payment marketing.

Like many payments executives, Martin Ferenczi believes the U.S. payments market will not meet the card network-imposed October 2015 target for migration to chip-based EMV technology.

The telco-operated Isis mobile payments initiative plans to rebrand to avoid carrying the same name as a Middle Eastern militant group referred to as "ISIS" by western journalists.

A recent GAO report called for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be involved in interagency discussions about virtual currencies, but others say the bureau's jurisdiction is murky, technology may move too fast for consumer rulemaking and too much regulation too early could kill innovation.

Merchants are wary of the proprietary look and feel of the process by which the card networks and issuers are adopting new security standards.

Yapital, a payment technology company based in Luxembourg, is testing a feature that will allow consumers to authorize payments with their fingerprints. The technology is aimed replacing PINs that consumers use to authorize purchases though the Yapital app.