Payment processing

Ebay Inc.’s PayPal unit no longer will process personal online payments to India, the third-party payments provider said in a blog post this week.

Visa Inc.’s announcement Monday that this summer it will expand its “No Signature Required” program for magnetic stripe card transactions less than $25 to the majority of merchants could create yet another setback for contactless-payment growth in the United States, some observers say.

The Secure POS Vendor Alliance, an Atlanta-based trade organization representing point-of-sale terminal makers, says it is forming the Lab Network, a collection of research labs that would work on shared security matters.

Outsourced third-party vendors managed the majority of compromised systems for businesses in 2009, and they often introduced the deficiencies fraudsters exploited to access the system, according to data from Trustwave, a Chicago-based payment-security firm.

Point-of-sale terminal maker XAC Automation Corp. will use advanced payment-data encryption technology from Voltage Security Inc. in its new devices, Voltage announced this week.

Big banks are starting to open the tech-spending spigot, but times are tight for their smaller peers.

Xerox Corp. said Monday it has completed its roughly $6.4 billion acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services Inc., an outsourcer that, among other things, processes credit card applications for issuers.

Processors, not independent sales organizations, likely will bear the brunt of a law that takes effect next January requiring acquirers to report merchant credit and debit card transactions to the Internal Revenue Service, says Henry Helgeson, co-CEO of Merchant Warehouse Inc., a Boston-based ISO.

Dozens of credit unions are walking away from the $60 million payment Visa issuers will get for the costs they incurred for the massive credit card breach at Heartland Payments System.

First Bank & Trust of Brookings, S.D., today announced it is issuing a decoupled, affinity debit card for In Defense of Animals, a nonprofit animal-rights group. Tempo Payments Inc. will process the card’s transactions on its payments platform.

In today’s economy, merchants still want to know how much credit and debit card processing is going to cost, but independent sales organizations say price is only one part of the sales pitch. Listening to what the merchant says it needs can be equally as important in securing the deal.

Citigroup Inc. is said to be switching its entire North American banking operations to a core processing application from Fidelity National Information Services Inc.

From the January/February 2010 issue of ISO&Agent.

From the January/February 2010 issue of ISO&Agent.

Hypercom Corp. will provide more than 12,000 PIN pads with EMV contactless card readers to European retailer Carrefour, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based point-of-sale terminal maker announced Thursday.

A growing number of financial companies are trying to foster creativity with in-house innovation labs.

More than 97% of Visa credit and debit card issuers have accepted last month’s offer from Visa Inc., Heartland Payments Systems Inc. and Heartland’s acquirers to settle claims related to the payment processor’s 2008 network data breach, according to the companies.

Citing the continued clamp down on consumer spending caused by the recession, MasterCard today reported healthier global purchase volume for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, while U.S. credit card volume fell.

Buoyed by improving economic trends around the world, Visa Inc. on Wednesday reported purchase-volume growth in all categories except U.S. credit for the quarter ended Dec. 31. Visa also for the first time reported its operational performance data and financial results simultaneously for the same quarter. It previously reported operational data a quarter later than its earnings.

North American Bancard’s decision to hire Deutsche Bank Securities is to “explore the opportunity to strategically align ourselves with financial partners to pursue any opportunities,” Marc Gardner, the independent sales organization’s president, tells PaymentsSource. North American Bancard earlier this week announced the Deutsche Bank hiring.