Technology

In a warm-up for tomorrow’s Capitol Hill hearing on the Federal Reserve Board’s proposed debit-interchange rules, merchants’ representatives during a press conference today said that unless the rules are left unchanged, merchants might be forced to lay off employees.

Better-than-expected merchant reaction to Intuit Inc.’s offer of free card readers and no monthly service fees to small merchants using its GoPayment mobile-payments service has prompted the company to extend the offer indefinitely, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced Feb. 16.

Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc. posted record fourth-quarter revenue while profits soared nearly 70% from a year earlier, the debt buyer and collection agency announced Feb. 15.

Economic improvements are helping Heartland Payment Systems Inc., which reported on Feb. 16 that higher spending led to a small jump in fourth-quarter net revenue.

As many as 1,000 credit union members around Maine are believed to have had their card accounts compromised and are now reporting unauthorized transactions on their accounts.

BB&T Corp. is launching a prepaid card that costs slightly more per month than some competing products — but lacks many back-end fees that have caught the ire of advocacy groups.

Deborah McWhinney, the head of Citigroup's flagging personal banking and wealth management group, is leaving her post after a tumultuous two-year run in which she attempted to makeover the nation's third-largest bank following the spin-off of its Smith Barney brokerage unit in 2009.

The powerful senator who sponsored last year’s amendment to the Dodd-Frank Reform Act regulating debit card interchange is confident his provision will stand, even as the House begins deliberations aimed at changing the provision, or at least delaying its enactment.

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s mobile check-deposit service stood out to the financial services industry as one of the few to make it to market without technology from Mitek Systems Inc. But now even Chase counts itself among Mitek’s growing list of customers.

MasterCard Worldwide plans to bring payment security to U.S. consumers through passcode-generating display cards, the card brand announced Feb. 14 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.