Payment processing

Wedding bells are ringing again for technology vendors, but many bank executives do not know on which side of the aisle to sit for their immediate buying decisions.

Revenue from electronic channels supported by The Western Union Co., including westernunion.com, account-based funds transfers and mobile funds transfers, grew by more than 35% during the second quarter, the company said in announcing its earnings for the period.

Few of the security features designed to prove a credit card’s validity in the physical world work well online. One startup aims to change that.

Payments-technology vendor ACI Worldwide Inc. has submitted a bid to buy rival S1 Corp. for $540 million, aiming to thwart a separate deal S1 announced last month to merge with Fundtech Ltd., ACI announced July 26.

Signaling the opening of a new market for Chinese manufacturers and retailers, Alibaba Group Ltd. is working with Western Union to develop an online payment platform, the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce specialist announced earlier this month.

Credit card issuers wanting to improve profitability in the wake of the recession could get better results by looking more closely at their own fraud cases to determine specifically which type of fraud criminals are perpetrating and how to stop it, new research from Experian PLC suggests.

If a hacker gets into the cash-register software of a restaurant, captures credit card information and sells it on the Internet to counterfeiters all over the world, it could take months or years for police to pinpoint the source.

The joint venture Global Payments Inc.’s entered into in Spain late last year with one of Europe’s top banks delivered better-than-expected revenue and helped drive fiscal fourth-quarter earnings, the merchant processor’s top executive told analysts during a July 21conference call to discuss the quarter’s earnings.

Strong revenue performance in North America helped boost Global Payments Inc.’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue by 22.3%, to $519.8 million from $425.1 million during the same period last year, the Atlanta-based merchant processor announced July 21.

As the hype for widespread Near Field Communication-enabled mobile payments continues to heat up, eBay Inc.’s CEO doused some cold water on the concept, suggesting instead that large merchants will resist the unproven technology.

Preventing a damaged reputation, more so than cost, is what drives online merchants to improve their data security and comply with industry standards. And more merchants are starting to use third parties to store their payments data to improve security and protect their reputations, new research suggests.

Merchants selling digital content likely grimace at the thought of a consumer making a 99-cent purchase using a credit card because of the fees involved with that transaction.

Buoyed by a reduction in loan-loss reserves and a modest increase in credit and debit card purchase volume, U.S. Bancorp on July 20 said second-quarter net income for its payments services unit doubled from the same period last year.

Giftango Corp. wants to give merchants a head start on the mobile-wallet age by placing two-dimensional barcodes on the back of their proprietary, closed-loop gift cards to enable consumers to convert the plastic to a digital format via a smartphone camera, among other capabilities.

Banks are still digesting a full plate of mortgage and other economic woes, but that is not stopping them from adding ambitious technology projects to their diet, if the first of the vendor earnings reports is an indication.

The biggest trend in merchant acquiring this year is a concentration on developing and selling mobile card acceptance to micromerchants, a new report suggests.

Isis, the wireless carrier-led mobile-payments venture, just crossed off a relatively small but integral item on its to-do list in signing Visa Inc., American Express Co. and MasterCard Worldwide to its system.

Electronic invoicing companies Transactis Inc. and Data Impact have merged their operations to better serve billers and banks, the companies announced July 19.

Isis, the mobile carrier-led mobile payments venture that initially planned to compete against incumbent payment networks, now has formed relationships with them, it announced July 19.

Citigroup Inc. plans to issue chip-based credit cards that adhere to the EMV Integrated Circuit Card Specifications later this year.