Merchant

The mortgage delinquency rate - the rate of borrowers 60 days or more delinquent on their mortgages - continued its fast decline, falling to 2.72% in the second quarter ended June 30, according to TransUnion.

Once again the markets have fallen in love with a group of young, aggressive and not very regulated lenders.

City officials in Trenton, N.J. have hired a collection agency to pursue more than $2.9 million in outstanding municipal court fines.

Two research associations have filed a joint motion to intervene in a court case against new telephone rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission.

The FTC announced that judges for its Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back contest selected a first place winner for the $25,000 cash prize for building a mobile app that blocks and forwards robocalls to a crowd-sourced honeypot.

The United States is one the last developed countries to migrate to an EMV-based payments infrastructure, with a card network-imposed liability shift going into effect on October 1.

The small merchants that turn to Square for their card acceptance needs are also among the most reluctant to swap out their hardware for devices that can handle EMV-chip cards, so Square is putting into play a strategy that banks have long used to get consumers on board with new technology.

Total System Services (TSYS), the Columbus, Ga.-based payment processor, has hired Patricia A. Watson to be senior executive vice president and chief information officer, effective Sept. 14.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a regulatory mandate to shrink. But that's easier said than done, given the government-sponsored enterprises' outsized presence in the mortgage industry, as their latest quarterly results show.

Officials in Mahanoy City, Pa. will direct delinquent garbage accounts to a new collection agency that will charge people an added 25% late fee on all overdue accounts but will collect no additional fees from the city.