Merchant

The majority of U.S. financial institutions expect their consumer lending businesses to grow or remain steady in 2011.

Blue Bamboo, a China-based point-of-sale terminal maker, on Feb. 18 announced that its P25-M printer is in final testing for approval as a Bluetooth device that works with devices using Apple Inc.’s iOS software.

Vendors often tout their products in press releases and through other efforts seeking publicity. But sometimes they choose to keep things relatively low key.

Hypercom Corp.’s preview of its fourth-quarter earnings Feb. 16 raised fears about the viability of VeriFone Systems Inc.’s plans to acquire its competitor in the second half of the year.

Having successfully nudged lawmakers to reconsider interchange caps, card issuers and payments networks are weighing the ramifications of another, less-discussed part of the Durbin amendment: so-called steering rules.

A glance at fraud statistics would seem to yield an obvious answer: the United States needs to catch up with the rest of the world and upgrade old-school magnetic stripe cards to modern chip and PIN models.

Mobile-network operators NTT Docomo Inc. of Japan and KT Corp. of South Korea have inked a deal to support Near Field Communication payments for smartphones in the two countries that use Google Inc.’s Android operating system.

The Australian capital territory of Canberra plans to roll out the MyWay smart card ticketing system on its Action bus service starting Feb. 21, a spokesperson at the bus operator tells PaymentsSource.

Financial institutions and consumers will be able to more quickly detect and respond to fraudulent transactions and suspicious bank-account activity using a mobile-based fraud-management service ClairMail Inc. has developed, the San Rafael, Calif.-based company announced Feb. 17.

Until a few years ago, payment card processors and merchant acquirers found it relatively easy to incorporate biannual April and October updates of interchange-rate tables and other mandates from the payment networks into their systems.