Bank technology

After an issuer's short-term loan program was shut down, NetSpend, which offered the program, said there is still room for some form of lending product among its offerings.

Scammers prey on frustrated customers in ATM fraud scheme involving paper jams; once thought to be dying, ZeuS Trojan regains its support; ATM thief sentenced; and more.

Consumers have yet to widely adopt bill payment on smartphones — a trend some say is typical of new bill-pay systems.

MBNA Europe said Monday that it has redesigned its website. The Bank of America Corp. unit said the online banking site has been made easier to use, based on feedback from its online customers.

Wausau Financial Systems Inc. said Monday that it will improve its package of treasury applications with the purchase of a cash management and deductions management software program.

You can learn the risky, expensive way — by pursuing manifest destiny or the old and slow test-and-learn. Or you can test and learn faster, more economically and with much less risk.

"It was our market to lose and to whatever extent that we lost ... we did it to ourselves," says Marc Hedlund, the second and last CEO of the pioneering but now-defunct PFM site.

After years of efforts by banks to get their commercial clients to ditch paper checks, electronic payments have finally begun to wrest a significant share of the business-to-business market.

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Smaller merchants' varying awareness of Payment Card Industry data security standards suggests a need to tailor PCI-compliance efforts, even among the smallest of merchants, ControlScan Inc. said.

When Joseph L. Cowan came on as Online Resources' chief executive in June, he explained that his approach was to spend three to five months studying the banking and bill-payment vendor and developing a new strategy.

First Data Corp. said it expects the Federal Reserve Board's still-unwritten debit interchange rules to help its business.

Banking consolidation can be a curse for some technology vendors, but it has helped Jack Henry & Associates Inc. cushion declines in spending on some of its product lines.

Buzz around iPhone payments reignited this week with unconfirmed reports that Apple was vying with Google Inc. to buy Boku Inc., a San Francisco company that enables consumers to charge purchases to their mobile phone bill.

The ATM independent sales organization Cardtronics Inc. reported Tuesday that its net income of rose 172% to $17.4 million for the third quarter from the same period last year. Revenue rose 6.2% to $136.6 million.

Stronger authentication methods may protect against a card scam akin to flash floods; scammers sending false invoices to Google Checkout users; Google asking for security breach — literally; and more.

As if the payments industry has not faced enough difficulty with new regulations and the fallout from a poor economy, a new study now links card use to obesity.

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The Federal Reserve expects to turn a profit on its check processing operations for a second consecutive year in 2011 as the proportion of payments cleared electronically continues to increase.

Clients of the Chickasaw Nation Women, Infants and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program, known as WIC, now may use an electronic benefits transfer debit card for qualified food purchases, it said last week.