Cards

Transport for London, the government agency in charge of city's rail and bus systems, plans to introduce contactless payments for rail customers in mid-September.

The payment processor Total System Services (TSYS) has upgraded the card management software that C. Hoare & Co. uses manage its Visa card portfolio.

The state of California will no longer be able to deposit child support payments onto prepaid accounts that lack certain consumer protections, under a law signed July 23 by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Total System Services (TSYS) is working with well-known brands like Western Union and Brinks to boost adoption of prepaid cards as the CEO of its NetSpend prepaid unit prepares to leave the company.

Payments provider Shazam Inc. has agreed to make MasterCard's EMV debit application available to participants in the Shazam electronic funds transfer network.

Cardtronics Inc. is set to buy Welch ATM for $160 million, expanding the ATM provider with an additional 26,000 kiosks.

Mobile wallets are designed to make it easy to pay from a linked credit or debit card, but the process of using loyalty and gift cards can be a bit trickier. CashStar is working to take some of the pain out of this process for users of its gift card platform.

People's United in Bridgeport, Conn., has started a payments firm in partnership with Vantiv in a move that aided the company's quarterly results.

First Data's sale of $3.5 billion of its common equity in the private placement market closed on Friday, July 11.

Dan Henry is leaving his job as chief executive of NetSpend effective July 31, and will be succeeded by Chuck Harris, who is president of the prepaid card company, a unit of the processor TSYS. Henry's exit will be the second departure of a top TSYS executive this month

The ATM maker and bank technology provider Diebold has named Sal Mahbouba as vice president of global services.

What's in a name? Many payment companies have struggled with this question, finding out too late that the name they chose sent the wrong message or was rendered unusable by situations outside the brand's control.

In Ireland, credit unions are speeding up the launch of their electronic payment alternatives and working with Visa and MasterCard to offer debit cards to compete more aggressively with local banks.

Merchants are wary of the proprietary look and feel of the process by which the card networks and issuers are adopting new security standards.

In the banking world, branches came first and ATMs came later to streamline the experience. But in the Bitcoin world, ATMs came first with limited features, and the ATM makers are working hard to add the sort of services that one might find in a mainstream bank branch.

Throughout Europe and Asia in particular, ATMs are being used to distribute an increasingly wide array of financial and non-financial products and services. This is in sharp contrast to the U.S., where most advanced ATMs offer the same set of banking-related features.

MasterCard Inc. has completed its acquisition of Pinpoint Pty. Ltd., an Australia-based loyalty and rewards service provider.

The telco is offering Payleven's hardware to enable its small-business customers to comply with an Italian mandate to cut back on cash use.

Sweden's Seamless has entered into an agreement with InComm that will enable the Atlanta, Ga.-based company to offer digitized versions of reloadable closed-loop cards.

In SaveUp's first foray into the payments industry, the financial management provider is linking its reward program to PayPal's prepaid MasterCard to attract younger consumers.