Cards

Sanjay Sakhrani, an analyst at KBW Inc.'s Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc., trimmed his profit estimates for MasterCard Inc. after it reported second-quarter results that he said showed "some slowing in the U.S."

Heartland Payment Systems Inc. says that a marketing agreement with a group of school identification-card providers will help it boost sales of its campus payment card systems to small and midsize schools.

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Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. posted double-digit revenue increases last quarter as nondiscretionary spending on cards cushioned the effects of the U.S. consumer slowdown and international and cross-border volumes continued to exhibit healthy growth.

Simon Property Group Inc. has begun to offer Visa-branded Olympic-themed gift cards at 185 of its malls around the country, the shopping center management company announced yesterday. Simon is selling the cards in denominations of $20 to $500 at guest service centers at the malls, the company says. Consumers pay a $3 handling fee per card, $1 of which goes to support the U.S. Olympic Committee, Cathi Weiner, Simon senior vice president for business development, tells CardLine. Simon plans to sell 100,000 cards, and each one includes a Coca-Cola-branded compact disc with custom content and links to Internet sites that have music, ring tones, and coupons from Coca Cola Co., Panasonic and Sega Games, the company says. Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank issues the cards, Weiner says. The cards will be on sale through August, Weiner says.

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Visa Inc. said late Wednesday that its earnings for its fiscal third quarter, which ended June 30 - its first full quarter as a publicly traded company - rose 41% from a year earlier, to $422 million, or 51 cents a share.

Chet Mullin, Omaha World-Herald, Neb. McClatchy-Tribune Info Svc

Merchant acquirers will have to report their retailers' credit and debit card transactions to the Internal Revenue Service under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which President Bush signed into law Wednesday.

Singapore-based OCBC Bank says it will work with the country's contactless transit card scheme EZ-Link to launch a mobile-phone top-up service for commuters. Consumers in Singapore use EZ-Link cards for trains, buses and retail purchases. The mobile top-up service would require customers to use credit or debit cards to add value to EZ-Link accounts. Customers would use their mobile phones to access OCBC's mobile banking or the EZ-Link Web sites, the bank says in a statement. Customers would receive the added value when tapping their transit cards at an "EZ-Online" station, Patrick Chew, the bank's head of group delivery, tells CardLine Global. EZ-Link has installed the stations at five "high-traffic" train stations, Chew says. Ten schools also "have agreed to provide a dedicated [computer] with an EZ-Link card reader attached to allow their students to update the increased value in their cards for immediate use," Chew adds. EZ-Link customers make more than 4 million transactions each day, the bank says.

Transit authorities in Beijing want operators of some 67,000 taxicabs to install readers that accept prepaid transit cards, according to state-owned Xinhua newspaper. The Beijing Traffic Management Bureau wants taxi operators to begin upgrades next month. The city's transit officials began issuing prepaid chip cards in April 2006 that residents can use to pay for bus and train rides and for some retail purchases. "The acceptance of transit cards in taxis is good for Beijing," Hua Zhang, a banking analyst in the China office of United States-based Celent LLC, tells CardLine Global. "Paying small amounts of cash for taxis is very troublesome." Beijing has more than 25 million prepaid transit cards in circulation, according to Celent.

German consumers buying goods and services online will pay with something other than a credit card for about 66% of such purchases, according to a report released Wednesday by Germany-based acquirer and payment-services firm Pago eTransaction Services GmbH. By contrast, consumers from other regions around the world use credit cards for 90% of online purchases. Pago based the report on analyses of some 30 million purchases the company processed between October 2006 and September 2007. The report also shows how much better British online merchants are than their counterparts in other countries in attracting international customers. British online merchants attract about 55% of their customers from outside the United Kingdom. One-third of those non-British consumers come from outside Europe, Pago says. By contrast, German online merchants see fewer than 5% of online purchases from customers outside Germany. Of those international customers, 0.8% come from outside Europe. "This could be a result of the language barrier," Pago says in a news release, noting that English is "understood by a majority of e-commerce consumers." Consumers in Germany and the UK show the most enthusiasm for online shopping, followed by those in France and Ireland, the report says.

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