Payment processing

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.

Bank of Ireland is rolling out what it claims is the first contactless Visa debit card from an Irish bank.

As a growing number of United Kingdom-based merchants adopt contactless payment technology as part of a broad regional effort leading up to the 2012 Olympic Games, specific retailers are seeing the technology’s benefits.

Wikileaks and Iceland-based data-hosting service DataCell ehf. say they will file a complaint on July 7 with the European Commission against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide if the payment companies continue to block their payment-processing.

Western Union Co. said Tuesday that it is buying the business payments unit of London-based Travelex Holdings Ltd. for 606 million pounds, or about $1 billion.

In an unintended consequence of the newly revised federal rules on cybersecurity, banks are likely to fare much worse in lawsuits over fraud losses.

Boku Inc. is about to make it easier for consumers to purchase virtual items that might help them better conquer laughing pigs with different kinds of birds on their mobile phones.

Online and mobile-payment startup Dwolla Corp. has been building a payment network called Grid that company executives believe to be more secure than MasterCard Worldwide’s and Visa Inc.’s card networks.

Bill-payment processor Tio Networks Corp. is making headway with its mobile bill-payment application.