Edward McKinley

With prospects for the Japanese economy still dismal after years of stagnation, Japan-based JCB Co. Ltd. is continuing to look abroad for growth. Since hitting bottom in March of last year, Japanese economic activity has shown signs of “gentle,” but not necessarily sustainable, growth, and it appeared ready to slip back into decline in the first half of this year, according to the Japan Research Institute Ltd., a local think tank.

China UnionPay Co. Ltd., the Shanghai-based national electronic-payments network and card brand, grew prodigiously last year but is coming under attack from domestic and foreign rivals vexed by its monopoly powers and runaway expansion.

In 2007, Discover Financial Services began monitoring social-networking Web sites. By early 2008, the brand had built an in-house listening platform to follow blogs and postings about financial services in general and Discover in particular by “crawling” such sites as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube using key words and phrases.

American Express Co. is adding white to a rainbow of credit and charge cards that already includes green, gold, platinum, blue, black, plum and clear. The new color graces the Zync card, a charge card AmEx is marketing to 20- and 30-somethings with customized rewards, variable annual fees and a social network called the Zync Tank.

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.

For many Americans, the family home represents the single biggest purchase they will ever make and the engine of most of the wealth they will accumulate in their lifetimes. It follows that card issuers see an opportunity in tying their products to the family home.

That bulge in the mailbox is not just your imagination. After a two-year slump, credit card issuers broke the record for direct mail volume last year, sending potential customers more than 5 billion card offers.

Identifying their most profitable customers is becoming much less of a gamble for gaming houses. More and more casinos are using magnetic-stripe cards to help identify their most valuable gamers and shower them with points, perks, special offers and invitations to big events.

With members of Visa USA and MasterCard International now free to issue American Express and Discover cards, marketing is taking on increased importance in the card industry. While issuers are rolling out new varieties of television and print ads, the leading card sponsors are feeling growing pressure to use their own innovative campaigns to differentiate their brands and maintain brand identity.