Merchant

As his company continues its mission to replace wallets and traditional payment terminals, MobilePayUSA CEO Randy Smith believes his company’s Virtual Terminal represents “more than a new way to pay; you are getting payments and marketing.”

Acknowledging the growing movement toward EMV chip-and-PIN technology in the U.S., most card-security professionals believe banks eventually will move away from issuing magnetic stripe cards, albeit slowly, a new survey report suggests.

William Ferguson, the former owner of Bush & Kennedy Inc., a Baton Rouge, La.-based collection agency, has been charged with bank fraud and aggravated identity theft that allegedly cost Hancock Bank more than $126,000.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine filed a lawsuit against Diversified Real Estate Consultants LLC (DREC), a foreclosure rescue company based in Florida.

Consumer credit card debt fell 10% during the first half of the year and 17% from a year ago, and now totals $6,472, according to data Credit Karma released Wednesday. Credit scores held steady since the start of the year at 667, down two points from June 2010.

Collective Point of Sale Solutions Ltd., a Toronto-based merchant-services provider, is deploying Hypercom Corp. point-of-sale terminals to split and transmit EMV credit and debit card transactions to the least-costly processors, the companies announced July 12.

Not many companies are doubling their business estimates for the next year, but PayPal Inc. has done just that by projecting a 100% upside for mobile payments. Today it pushed the gas even harder by making Near Field Communication technology available as part of peer-to-peer payments.

The Chicago area’s regional transportation systems have until 2015 to develop a universal transit fare system commuters could use across three different schemes under legislation signed into law last week.

An ATM services provider sums up the situation this way: “Don’t be discouraged. There is still ample opportunity within the ATM industry.”

With Canada being one of the world’s more developed contactless-payments markets in terms of cards issued, more merchants there are starting to accept the tap-and-go transactions, the latest being 1,400 McDonald’s restaurants, which will do so starting this summer.