Technology

Most large U.S. merchants easily will comply with Visa Inc.’s first level of incentives to make payment terminals ready to accept contact and contactless EMV cards next year as part of the card brand’s U.S. push toward chip card technology, but it may take smaller merchants a year or two to get there, payment industry experts suggest.

When newly acquired card customers from HSBC’s U.S. card program and ING’s online bank are folded into Capital One Financial Corp.’s existing base, they will have a rapidly expanding array of digital transaction and payments channels from which to choose.

The battle for supremacy in mobile person-to-person payments is raging. To date, its primary ordnance has been limited to the press release and the corporate event, most of them volleyed by big-name operators of existing payment networks, such as PayPal Inc., Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide and Google Inc.

If data-security standards compliance in the United States mirrors what has occurred in Europe, the onset of EMV chip-and-PIN technology in the U.S. will not mean major retailers will skip validating their compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard each year, the head of the PCI Security Standards Council contends.

Subprime credit card issuer First Premier Bank is suing the Federal Reserve Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over a new rule that would limit fees the issuer charges high-risk customers when opening card accounts.

The Federal Reserve Board’s decision to cut debit card interchange effective Oct. 1 will provide a “kick start” for growth at Global Cash Access Holdings Inc., but other events, including contracts with new casinos opening up, also with help drive revenues over the next 12 to 18 months, the company’s top executive told analysts Aug. 9 during a conference call to discuss second-quarter earnings.

Mirroring its explanation for the previous quarter’s reduction in year-over-year revenue, Global Cash Access Holdings Inc. on Aug. 9 cited continued weakness in the gaming sector and consumer revolving credit and the loss of Harrah’s Entertainment’s casino business, the company’s largest customer, late last year as the chief attributing factors behind the company’s reduction in second-quarter income.

Instead of dipping its toe into the mobile-payments pool, Heartland Payment Systems Inc. intends to make a splash with a retail application that can enable a merchant’s employees to complete sales transactions anywhere in or out of the store.

The U.S. government’s debt-negotiation struggles and the resulting stock market chaos following Standard & Poor’s Aug. 5 downgrade of the country’s sovereign debt likely will cause a “hiccup” in consumer credit card spending just as it was beginning to recover, a First Data Corp. executive tells PaymentsSource.

Visa Inc. has introduced a series of incentives to spur the U.S. to adopt chip cards–a change once considered as likely as the country switching to the metric system.