Technology

Issuers seeing the first signs of growth in consumer credit card borrowing in nearly three years might be hoping the long drought is over, but it is too soon to celebrate, analysts say.

Collective Point of Sale Solutions Ltd., a Toronto-based merchant-services provider, is deploying Hypercom Corp. point-of-sale terminals to split and transmit EMV credit and debit card transactions to the least-costly processors, the companies announced July 12.

Banks and credit card companies are likeliest to succeed in mobile payments, contend business executives surveyed recently.

With a 98% retention rate, USAA Federal Savings Bank seems to have little room to improve customer service for its payments and other operations. But it has spent the past two years and millions of dollars overhauling systems to do just that.

CoVantage Credit Union is working with the software vendor Tyfone Inc. to make its customers’ wallets more mobile.

Not many companies are doubling their business estimates for the next year, but PayPal Inc. has done just that by projecting a 100% upside for mobile payments. Today it pushed the gas even harder by making Near Field Communication technology available as part of peer-to-peer payments.

Signaling plans to stick with its strategy of diversifying beyond its core general-purpose credit card operations, Capital One Financial Corp. on July 13 said its second-quarter purchase volume rose and its charge-off rate fell, partly as a result of its acquisition of the Kohl’s Corp. private-label credit card operation.

Call it a need for “consolidation education” among at least one in every four credit cardholders in the United Kingdom who carry balances but who are unaware of other loan products to consolidate their card debt.

An ATM services provider sums up the situation this way: “Don’t be discouraged. There is still ample opportunity within the ATM industry.”

With Canada being one of the world’s more developed contactless-payments markets in terms of cards issued, more merchants there are starting to accept the tap-and-go transactions, the latest being 1,400 McDonald’s restaurants, which will do so starting this summer.