Payment processing

Payments-software provider Distra Pty. Ltd. of Sydney, Australia, is hiring a U.S.-based staff and has opened an office in Atlanta, the company announced recently.

With Google Inc.’s Aug. 15 announcement of an agreement to acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, the search giant potentially has turbocharged its mobile-payment plans.

A venture involving Visa Inc. and health care payments processor 3Pea International Inc. is enabling doctors’ offices and hospitals to provide prepaid cards to patients for use in paying copayments on prescription drugs to encourage repeat prescription refills.

ACI Worldwide Inc. is rolling out an upgraded version of its payments server that will boost security systems and marketing processes for retail clients, including the ability to offer consumers immediate rewards at the point of sale, a company executive says.

An Australian credit union in Illawarra is trying to recover after several hundred members were victimized by a card-skimming operation.

An owner of a new restaurant likely would not hesitate to buy a $300 fire extinguisher to comply with local fire codes, but he might put off spending about half that much to ensure compliance with standards designed to protect customers’ credit card data, a new report suggests.

An owner of a new restaurant likely would not hesitate to buy a $300 fire extinguisher to comply with local fire codes, but he might put off spending about half that much to ensure compliance with standards designed to protect customers’ credit card data, a new report suggests.

Visa Inc.’s new U.S. EMV initiative will have far-reaching consequences for merchants and card issuers, but the other card networks may not follow it exactly in drawing their roadmaps for migrating to advanced chip card technologies, certain observers say.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the demise of the decoupled-debit card may have been greatly exaggerated.

Most large U.S. merchants easily will comply with Visa Inc.’s first level of incentives to make payment terminals ready to accept contact and contactless EMV cards next year as part of the card brand’s U.S. push toward chip card technology, but it may take smaller merchants a year or two to get there, payment industry experts suggest.

When newly acquired card customers from HSBC’s U.S. card program and ING’s online bank are folded into Capital One Financial Corp.’s existing base, they will have a rapidly expanding array of digital transaction and payments channels from which to choose.

If data-security standards compliance in the United States mirrors what has occurred in Europe, the onset of EMV chip-and-PIN technology in the U.S. will not mean major retailers will skip validating their compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard each year, the head of the PCI Security Standards Council contends.

Subprime credit card issuer First Premier Bank is suing the Federal Reserve Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over a new rule that would limit fees the issuer charges high-risk customers when opening card accounts.

The Federal Reserve Board’s decision to cut debit card interchange effective Oct. 1 will provide a “kick start” for growth at Global Cash Access Holdings Inc., but other events, including contracts with new casinos opening up, also with help drive revenues over the next 12 to 18 months, the company’s top executive told analysts Aug. 9 during a conference call to discuss second-quarter earnings.

Mirroring its explanation for the previous quarter’s reduction in year-over-year revenue, Global Cash Access Holdings Inc. on Aug. 9 cited continued weakness in the gaming sector and consumer revolving credit and the loss of Harrah’s Entertainment’s casino business, the company’s largest customer, late last year as the chief attributing factors behind the company’s reduction in second-quarter income.

Instead of dipping its toe into the mobile-payments pool, Heartland Payment Systems Inc. intends to make a splash with a retail application that can enable a merchant’s employees to complete sales transactions anywhere in or out of the store.

Visa Inc. has introduced a series of incentives to spur the U.S. to adopt chip cards–a change once considered as likely as the country switching to the metric system.

Online retailers looking to reduce their number of declined transactions from different countries have a new tool available in their payments-processing kit.

Visa Inc. plans to accelerate the U.S. migration to EMV contact and contactless chip technology, the card brand announced Aug. 9.

Banks may have trouble performing the higher degree of analysis required by new security rules for payments initiated online, but their options include retraining staff and training software that learns from customers' spending patterns.