Technology

The merchant-acquiring deal Discover Financial Services struck this week with Global Payments Inc. to expand acceptance for its Discover and Diners Club cards in Europe and Asia caps a string of similar deals the company has inked over the past year. But it likely will not be Discover’s last such international acquiring deal, Gerard Wagner, Discover vice president of global acceptance, tells PaymentsSource.

First Data Corp. plans to use technology embedded into a digital memory card as the next step in evolving the payment processor’s contactless-payment technology.

Co-op Financial Services on March 15 signed a nonbinding letter of intent to purchase the Share System debit and ATM processing network from Members United Corporate Federal Credit Union. Terms were not disclosed.

More than 300 T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants plan to use a payment card security method that masks sensitive transaction data with a numerical token, says Merchant Link, the company providing the TransactionVault service.

International expansion will not benefit every company, and merchant-service providers that want to expand outside the United States should carefully evaluate their business models to determine whether such a strategy is feasible, some observers note.

MasterCard Worldwide today launched an ATM-finder application for Blackberry smartphones, nearly a year after the card brand rolled out the same free downloadable, customizable application for the Apple iPhone.

Will Detterman, the chief executive of Leap Payments Inc., admits he's taking a big chance in adopting a payment card acceptance pricing model that bucks the traditional formula.

Barclaycard reportedly plans to deploy mobile phones enabled with Near Field Communication payment technology in conjunction with France-based mobile-network operator Orange during the second half of this year. The report did not specify where the phone would be available, and both companies operate in multiple countries.

First Data Corp. yesterday reported flat growth in fourth-quarter card-processing revenue. The Atlanta-based processor says it generated revenue of $819.5 million in retail and alliances services for the quarter, down slightly from $819.8 million during the same period a year earlier. Retail and alliance services includes First Data’s merchant processing business. Full-year revenue for the segment totaled $3.1 billion, down 6.1% from $3.3 billion in 2008.

U.S. consumer credit card debt inched higher again for data released in February, but the average credit score remained the same as the previous month at 669, according to a March 10 report from Credit Karma Inc., a San Francisco-based company whose Web site tracks credit scores.