Kate Fitzgerald is an Arizona-based senior editor for American Banker and longtime payments reporter. Fitzgerald began her journalism career at the San Diego Tribune, and has worked as a reporter and editor at several other publications, including Advertising Age and the Arizona Republic. She is a graduate of Lewis & Clark College and holds a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
-
Merchants have never before had so many options for accepting cards, but a stubborn core that deals only in cash may never change its ways.
May 30 -
The prominent daily-deals provider Groupon is reportedly branching into payments with a device that competes with Square Inc.
May 29 -
More merchants are ignoring high card-not-present fraud rates to pursue untapped international markets for online sales.
May 25 -
Kmart plans to attract a bigger portion of the underbanked crowd by beefing up its walk-in bill-payment and prepaid debit card offerings.
May 25 -
Many U.S. issuers and merchants aren't sold on signature-only EMV cards — they will most likely take the popular chip-and-PIN approach, but it will take time and it may be a patchwork affair at first.
May 25 -
U.S. Bank's cobranded credit card smartphone app, which allows consumers to apply for credit cards in retail stores without filling out a paper application, is now available for Android handsets.
May 24 -
Mobile payment development may be held back by the unnecessary confusion surrounding mobile wallet security and standards, according to a top MasterCard executive.
May 23 -
U.S. credit card charge-offs ticked up in April, but Moody's Investors Service experts say it is merely an aberration in the general downward trend.
May 22 -
MasterCard is forming a cross-industry group to collaborate on U.S. EMV card migration, open to "every industry and entity" involved in chip cards — but Visa says it is still waiting for an invitation.
May 21 -
MasterCard today made the first move to begin talking with rivals and customers about how exactly the U.S. will adopt the EMV chip-card standard.
May 21 -
Citi, First Data and Mercator execs debated mobile wallet strategies at a panel discussion at NACHA.
May 2 -
BALTIMORE — Two large merchants at Nacha's Payments 2012 conference expressed decidedly negative views on the card networks' approach to the EMV secure chip-card standard in the U.S.
April 30 -
Large data breaches at companies like Global Payments (GPN) are just the tip of the iceberg of the financial industry's data security woes, says Steve Elefant, who was chief technology officer at Heartland Payment Systems (HPY) during its massive 2008 data breach.
April 9 -
Each new breach erodes consumer trust a bit more.
April 3 -
Kevin Knight, the master of Nordstrom's cobranded Visa credit and debit card rewards program, joins Visa as the company's head of credit and debit products, Visa announced March 28.
March 28 -
In its quest to rise above the fray in alternative payments, Obopay has identified another financial-services niche ripe for modernization: business-to-consumer payments.
March 28 -
Microsoft is touting a recent victory against servers hosting the Zeus malware that has plagued banks, but even it admits that the malware hasn't been completely defeated.
March 27 -
Zoom Tan doesn't accept cash or checks — and its customers are often too scantily clad to be carrying them anyway. It now uses a biometric fingerprint reader as an alternative to credit and debit cards.
March 21 -
Payments companies are beating card fraud on some fronts, but those victories could have a hidden cost. Overly aggressive fraud-screening measures driving card-not-present fraud down also could be preventing legitimate e-commerce
March 19 -
"The time when everybody and their dog could start a prepaid card company is coming to an end" and prepaid companies need to step up their use of technology to keep their customers, says Plastyc CEO Patrice Peyret.
March 16