Merchant

As banks continue to study the use of host card emulation (HCE) for Near Field Communication-based mobile payments, Ukraine's PrivatBank says it is one of the first to publicly launch an HCE service.

A payday lending reform bill in Utah passed a vote in the state's House, by a 69-4 vote, and moves to the full Senate after the Senate Business and Labor Committee unanimously endorsed it Thursday.

The CFPB sued an Indiana-based college for predatory lending, the agency's first action in the for-profit college industry. Some students did not realize they had a private loan until they began getting collection calls, the lawsuit states.

A bill aimed at altering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's structure and limiting its powers to regulate the consumer finance industry gained approval from the House of Representatives on Thursday but is unlikely to pass muster in the Senate.

Dash Software LLC, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based mobile payment provider that targets restaurants and bars, has raised $1.2 million in investment to launch its updated iPhone app in Manhattan.

Debt collection ranks second in the Federal Trade Commission's annual list of consumer complaints, according to the report released Thursday.

The payments industry still has much to do before anyone can claim mobile payments are secure. Many merchants, consumers, and processors are mistakenly comfortable with notion that encryption equals full security.

Revel Systems and Index are partnering to bring the kind of personalized consumer messaging that's common in e-commerce to the countertops of retail stores.

Square has purchased BookFresh, a company that sells booking and appointment management technology to merchants.

An estimated 782 different collection agencies and creditors were sued in January under consumer statutes, including the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.