Payment processing

No official movement is afoot to switch to EMV in the U.S., which is becoming increasingly Balkanized as the only major global region not moving to the more-secure chip-and-PIN technology. But a Visa Inc. executive is among experts suggesting that, though issuers, acquirers and merchants may be resisting the shift for a variety of reasons, EMV technology itself is not the biggest obstacle preventing the U.S. from adopting the standard.

First National Bank of Omaha plans to relinquish controlling interest in its First National Merchant Solutions merchant-acquiring arm to Total System Services Inc. in a joint venture the companies announced today.

First Data Corp. hopes to raise the stakes among payment-terminal makers and processors vying to encrypt cardholder data with a new product it contends goes further than other market offerings.

Though a few large merchants fail to achieve compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, many rely on alternative compensating controls to comply, according to a report released today by Thales Group and the Ponemon Institute. Many large merchants also are paying an average of $225,000 per year for PCI audits, according to the report.

Five years ago, biometric payments seemed ready for the American mainstream. Backers predicted that financial institutions and retailers soon would use fingerprint, palm, vein, iris or facial scans to verify consumers’ identities for ATM and point-of-sale transactions.

Bottomline Technologies said Wednesday that it has agreed to purchase Bank of America Corp.'s travel commission payments service.

Cardtronics USA Inc. announced Wednesday it has signed a long-term managed-services contract with Pacific Convenience & Fuels LLC, Cardtronics third such deal in less than a month.

Palmetto Bank in Greenville, S.C., has signed an integrated-services contract with Diebold Inc., a strategy the ATM manufacturer and more of its competitors have begun using to counter declining ATM sales to U.S.-based regional and small banks. The agreement’s terms were not disclosed.

Wright Express Corp., a payment-processing company for commercial and government vehicle fleets, recently reported a 3.6% rise in revenue for last year’s fourth quarter, to $83.8 million from $80.9 million during the same period a year earlier.

Despite a fourth quarter net loss Heartland Payment Systems Inc. attributes largely to breach-related expenses, the Princeton, N.J.-based payment processor sees “encouraging progress” in small and midsize merchant transaction-processing volume and same-store sales, Robert Carr, Heartland chairman and CEO, told analysts during a conference call last week.

Sales agents for ISOs increasingly are seeking additional industry training to improve their abilities to better compete for scarce business during the difficult economy, observers note.

Two companies that support online payments are getting involved with Facebook Inc. to streamline micropayments for virtual goods users purchase on the popular social networking Web site.

Merchant-portfolio sellers that harbored visions of selling their portfolios at 36 times their monthly residual revenue finally have acquiesced to buyers’ demand to pay less, say observers of the acquiring market. Residual revenue is the recurring transaction revenue acquirers collect from merchants.

Sales agents for independent sales organizations increasingly are seeking additional industry training to improve their abilities to better compete for scarce business during the difficult economy, observers note.

MShift filed suit in federal court in San Francisco Friday claiming Digital Insight is infringing on its patent for the company’s pioneering mobile banking technology that Digital Insight is providing to hundreds of credit unions and banks.

Mopay Inc. has announced plans to expand its global presence. Under the initiative, the Germany-based mobile-payments company hopes to enable U.S. consumers to purchase virtual goods and other digital content using their mobile-phone accounts, the company notes in a recent press release. It also hopes to create a new revenue channel to U.S. gaming and social-network providers.

A payment breach at an unnamed Helsinki, Finland, business has exposed transaction records from more than 100,000 payment cards to hackers, reports YLE, a news service of the Finnish Broadcasting Co.

Euronet Worldwide Inc., which conducts about 75% of its operations outside the United States, last week reported fourth-quarter revenue of $285.6 million, up 11.7% from $255.7 million during the same period in 2008. Revenue for the year totaled $1.03 billion, down 1.9% from $1.05 billion in 2008.

Despite a fourth quarter net loss Heartland Payment Systems Inc. attributes largely to breach-related expenses, the Princeton, N.J.-based payment processor sees “encouraging progress” in small and midsize merchant transaction-processing volume and same-store sales, Robert Carr, Heartland chairman and CEO, told analysts during a conference call this morning.

Fraudsters on the prowl for payment card data last year increasingly turned to the hospitality industry as a source for the valuable data, according to the Trustwave Global Security Report 2010 released yesterday.