Jeffrey Green

For international travelers, a new pact between a Citigroup Hong Kong unit and Planet Payment Inc. should take the mystery out of currency exchange rates on a purchase-by-purchase basis.

Consider it the beginning of the Next Generation for Card Express Inc. — literally. Launched in 1995 by Alan Safahi as a prepaid card provider supporting corporate cards, CardEx soon plans to venture into the consumer market. And Safahi's son, Sean, will lead the initiative as the firm's new CEO.

Credit and debit sales volumes have been crisscrossing over the past 17 months, but without an obvious explanation.

MasterCard plans to launch PayPass Wallet Services later this year to enable bank and merchant customers to allow purchases in stores or online by paying with a tap of a smartphone, click of a computer mouse or touch of a tablet screen.

Heartland Payment Systems' first-quarter earnings benefited from an economic recovery boost that helped improve same-store sales among its small and midsize customers.

A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin last week returned a unanimous verdict finding Blackhawk Network liable for infringing two InComm patent claims.

The prepaid card marketer NetSpend has entered into a distribution agreement to sell its Visa prepaid cards at 5,000 7-Eleven locations in the U.S.

An alternative payments company that lets users make electronic payments in cash is planning to quickly expand its user base and merchant clients with the addition of a mobile channel.

Intuit is taking its GoPayment mobile card reader to Canada and is redesigning the product to make it more appealing to use.

A California start-up is building what it calls the "Visa of prepaid." But it has a long ways to go before it becomes a household name.

And in good news for the economy, online spending over the Thanksgiving weekend was dramatically higher than last year.

Soon, even unbanked consumers can accept payment cards. Intuit plans to launch a prepaid card account that merchants may use to deposit sales made with its GoPayment device.

Chase Card Services is dropping the Blink contactless-payment brand from new and renewed cards and instead is using the contactless brands supported by the major card networks — Visa's payWave and MasterCard's PayPass.

Can using multiple branding terms to describe a payment process help an issuer to achieve its own brand loyalty and clarify its product message, or would doing so confuse customers?

Citing strong execution across each of its businesses, Global Payments Inc. on Oct. 4 reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $542.8 million, up 23.3% from $440.1 million during the same period last year.

Many financial institutions have eliminated their free checking accounts, and the fees they are charging rose this year, according to new research from Bankrate.com.

Bankcard originations hit a three-year high during the first five months of 2011, as banks eased their underwriting standards and started reextending credit to riskier borrowers, according to the credit bureau Equifax.

Visa Inc. plans to accelerate the U.S. migration to EMV contact and contactless chip technology, the card brand announced Aug. 9.

A start-up company's contactless-payment wristbands have gained the backing of the Visa brand under a product launch announced July 27.

NCR and Scopus Tecnologia, a wholly owned subsidiary of Banco Bradesco, have formed a strategic alliance for the manufacturing and development of ATMs in Brazil, the companies announced July 27.