Merchant

In a significant development that will extend where both Japanese and Chinese credit cardholders may use their cards abroad, Japan-based card organization JCB has signed a memorandum of understanding with China UnionPay to expand the scope of their merchant-acceptance relationship.

Discover Financial Services second-quarter profit more than doubled as declining delinquency and charge-off rates allowed the credit-card lender to tuck away a smaller amount of money to cover bad loans.

Signaling to Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide that they no longer are the lone payment card networks in India, the National Payments Corp. of India has joined with Bank of India to launch RuPay-branded debit cards.

A federal court banned three men and their company from the mortgage modification business and ordered them to pay nearly $19 million for consumer refunds, according to terms of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.

Public fallout from the data breaches that have affected Citigroup and other large enterprises in and out of finance in recent weeks has reached the political push back stage, with both Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) hoping the events will breathe new life into data protection legislation that’s failed in the past.

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration's push to create a national standard for when and how banks and other companies must notify customers of a data breach appears to be gaining momentum.

Joining the growing raft of processors rolling out advanced data-encryption services to help protect cardholders at the point of sale, Elavon Inc. on June 20 announced a portfolio of products and services dubbed Safe-T Suite.

The announcement last week by several telecommunication companies of plans to create a joint venture to fast-track mobile-payments processing potentially has broad implications for the mobile-payments market in Europe. But the companies have worked together before with little resulting success.

New car sales are finally on a rising trend line. Despite production delays at some automakers – in some cases Tsunami-related – year-over-year sales figures are heading upward, in some cases by double digits.

Despite efforts by major card companies to promote the speed and excitement of using mobile phones to pay, it likely will take more than glitzy marketing to convince consumers to use such services, according to a Federal Reserve strategist.