Stephanie Bell

Banks in some countries are introducing alternatives to the iconic magnetic stripe ATM card, encouraging mobile phones and other technology for cash access.

U.S. merchants now may process magnetic stripe, e-commerce and EMV chip-and-PIN payments using Yespay International Ltd.'s cross-border payment service.

Michaels Stores Inc. is alerting customers that PIN pads at its Chicago-area stores may have been tampered with and that debit and credit card information was possibly compromised.

MasterCard Inc., Banco PanAmericano SA and Rev Worldwide have unveiled a prepaid card in Brazil, where more than half of the country's employed residents are paid in cash.

Citing convenience and low interest rates, many credit-card holders prefer to leave a balance on one or more credit cards and accept revolving as a way of life, and this is helping issuers generate more interest income, a survey by Auriemma Consulting Group concluded.

American Express Co.'s net income rose 35.6%, to $1.2 billion, in the first quarter from a year earlier. Its total revenue net of interest expense rose 6.1%, to $7 billion, the company announced Wednesday.

Visa Europe is expressing dissatisfaction with last week's General Court of the European Union's decision to uphold the $14.7 million fine imposed on the company for refusing to do business with a U.S. bank, saying it had already settled the dispute in 2006.

The mobile payments provider Zong Inc. says that merchants are increasingly willing to pay higher transaction fees in exchange for higher sales.

Continuing a push to maintain its affluent customer base, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has added daily travel auctions to its Ultimate Rewards credit card program and has eliminated the foreign transaction fee on another of its cards.

LexisNexis has launched Retail Fraud Manager, a platform designed to help online merchants detect and combat card-not-present fraud by automating and analyzing the transaction-review process, the company said on Wednesday.

Web-based merchant clients of Litle & Co., a Lowell, Mass., e-commerce payment provider, may begin to protect themselves against card-not-present fraud through CyberSource Corp.'s Decision Manager online fraud prevention service.

Boku Inc., a San Francisco mobile payments company that allows consumers to make payments that appear as charges on their mobile phone bills, has begun a partnership with Telefonica O2 Germany GmbH, a unit of Telefonica SA of Spain.

Mobibucks Corp., the company behind a mobile marketing and payment service, said its system can now be used by diners at Field of Greens and Voodoo BBQ and Grill to receive discounts and make payments.

Littlewoods Europe's addition of Neteller's e-wallet as an accepted payment method will help protect customers against card-not-present fraud because they will not have to enter financial or personal information when making an online purchase, the U.K. online retailer said.

Visa Inc.'s continued push to promote its card products in Latin America and the Caribbean region helped produce considerable growth for the company, as sales volume rose 28%, to $270 billion from 2009, according to the card brand.

The Girl Scouts are demonstrating there is nearly as much variety in their mobile payment acceptance choices as there is in their cookie selection.

Post Office Ltd., a unit of Royal Mail Group Ltd. of London, is offering to cover the cost of return flights to six European cities to consumers who open a Post Office Credit Card by March 27.

YESpay International Ltd. has released its application programming interface specifications that merchants may use to integrate YESpay's mobile services into their point of sale systems, the London payment-services provider announced.

Sage Payment Solutions Inc., the payments unit of Sage North America, said it has enhanced its virtual payment terminal to help small merchants better manage their payment process.

With online orders on the increase, Domino's Pizza Group Ltd. in the United Kingdom has decided to add PayPal Inc. as a payment method.