Fintech

Sovereign Bank is taking its credit card operations in house.

A directive earlier this month from Visa Inc. designed to motivate merchants to support the EMV chip card standard for U.S. cards and payment terminals may spark a cottage industry in EMV training seminars and consulting.

Electronic funds transfer networks such as First Data Corp.’s Star are hearing increased chatter from financial institutions about securing and authenticating purchases at point-of-sale retail locations and online.

Representatives of 13 corporate credit unions and Co-op Financial Services have abandoned efforts to buy the payments functions from U.S. Central Federal Credit Union, the latest corporate initiative to fail, the representatives announced Sept. 2.

A U.S. shift to EMV smart cards for payments helped by a recent directive from Visa Inc. may not speed up the complicated process of converting thousands of ATMs to accept the new cards, but collaboration between ATM manufacturers and financial institutions to address the change should begin now, industry experts say.

TruWest CU has signed an ATM managed services deal with CO-OP Financial Services.

Growing use of its mobile payment services for banks increased Monitise PLC revenue for fiscal 2011, but the expense of developing new markets in Europe and Nigeria resulted in a pretax loss, the mobile-payments company said Sept. 1.

Viewing the world of bloggers as a potential retail landscape, Jumio Inc. has broadened the availability of its webcam credit card reader software to anyone using a WordPress Foundation website, the company CEO says.

Large banks such as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. have been working for years to build global payment “hubs,” or online-banking platforms their corporate customers may use to send and accept payments of different types and in foreign currencies to their customers and partners around the world.

The Federal Trade Commission is mailing more than 110,000 refund checks to consumers defrauded by an online operation that tricked payday loan applicants into paying for an unrelated debit card.