Payment processing

Union Bank of India Ltd. has signed an agreement with electronic payment services provider ElectraCard Services Pvt. Ltd. to set up an online payment gateway to help strengthen its presence in electronic payments.

Software vendor Aptys Solutions LLC has upgraded a program to make it easier for banks to use the Federal Reserve’s same-day settlement service for automated clearinghouse payments.

Continuing efforts to get its Serve digital wallet into consumers’ hands, American Express Co. has signed a deal with Sprint Nextel to put the payments application on the Sprint Zone website, where Sprint customers go to manage their mobile-phone accounts, Amex announced July 18.

Trying a new approach to prod consumer interest in contactless payment, U.S. Bancorp is testing a wrist gadget that combines tap-and-pay technology with an emergency medical notification device, the bank announced July 18.

Still on the fence about EMV? High uptake from an early adopter, the United Nations Federal Credit Union, is allowing it to expand the card's availability, and provides evidence U.S. cardholders really like to use chip and PIN cards when traveling overseas.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security warned last week about a vulnerability in the way Apple's iOS devices such as the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch deal with PDF files.

As the first Irish bank to promote contactless payments, The Bank of Ireland plans to use one-on-one communications with cardholders to promote the benefits of contactless payment technology when it rolls out Visa payWave cards later this year.

Responding to consumer demand for multiple alternative online-payment options, Retail Decisions Ltd. has added six payment types to its fraud-prevention and payment-processing offerings, the company announced July 7.

Supporting acceptance of electronic payments at large, international sporting events promotes higher transaction volumes among tourists for the countries that host them even after the events are over, according to a recent tourism impact report from Visa Inc.

Acknowledging the growing movement toward EMV chip-and-PIN technology in the U.S., most card-security professionals believe banks eventually will move away from issuing magnetic stripe cards, albeit slowly, a new survey report suggests.

Investors are listening closely to reports of a possible initial public offering of stock later this year by Vantiv LLC, one of the nation’s largest card processors.

To sign up for a Dwolla account and integrate it with a credit-union account was a fairly tedious process that could take two to three days–until FiSync came along to streamline the task to less than a minute.

Collective Point of Sale Solutions Ltd., a Toronto-based merchant-services provider, is deploying Hypercom Corp. point-of-sale terminals to split and transmit EMV credit and debit card transactions to the least-costly processors, the companies announced July 12.

Not many companies are doubling their business estimates for the next year, but PayPal Inc. has done just that by projecting a 100% upside for mobile payments. Today it pushed the gas even harder by making Near Field Communication technology available as part of peer-to-peer payments.

An ATM services provider sums up the situation this way: “Don’t be discouraged. There is still ample opportunity within the ATM industry.”

With Canada being one of the world’s more developed contactless-payments markets in terms of cards issued, more merchants there are starting to accept the tap-and-go transactions, the latest being 1,400 McDonald’s restaurants, which will do so starting this summer.

The former Cannabis Medical Solutions Inc. has turned over a new leaf.

Wikileaks supporters briefly regained access to Visa Inc.’s payment gateway in a series of rapid midweek developments, but by July 8 the gateway closed again, observers say.

PayPal revolutionized how consumers pay for goods online. It's not about to be usurped by the mobile payments movement.

In an analysis of email-based fraud released in late June, network giant Cisco quantified what newspaper headlines over the past year have made clear: cyberfraud has shifted from mass, generalized attacks to very specific spearphishing hits that harness stolen user information to dupe unwitting consumers (such as bank customers and credit and debit cardholders) into divulging account information.