Cards

Joe Proto, a payments executive and founder of several technology companies, is the new board chairman at prepaid card marketer The SpendSmart Co.

If retail stores seemed a little less crowded over the holiday weekend, tablets or smartphones are likely to blame, as the volume of e-commerce payments made via mobile devices surged during what some are now calling the "Cyber Five" shopping days — from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday.

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Britain's biggest taxpayer-owned lender, apologized for a technical fault that left customers unable to access accounts and offered to compensate those who have lost money.

Online remittance provider Xoom has followed up the quick start to its mobile payment services with local partnerships to allow the company's money transfer service to work across multiple channels.

The PayPal Digital Gifts website is a new e-commerce hub that sells virtual gift cards that can only be purchased using the eBay subsidiary's digital wallet.

NCR has been working to become a "hardware-enabled, software-driven business" for eight years. With its purchase of online and mobile banking vendor Digital Insight and transaction switching and fraud detection software company Alaric Systems, it's taken a big step forward.

NCR Corp. has agreed to purchase Menlo, Calif.-based Digital Insight Corp. for $1.65 billion. Separately, NCR also completed a purchase of Alaric Systems in London for $84 million.

Because of the changes that mobile will bring to the point of sale, the payments industry can expect to see acquisitions, consolidations and investments in that market over the next six to 12 months.

While nearly two thirds, or 61%, of U.S. online consumers have heard of a digital wallet, only 11% actually use one, an indicator that wallet providers still face challenges reaching consumers, according to Forrester Research.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. started offering a cloud computing service known as Ju Baopen for banks and securities firms, as China's largest e-commerce company ventures into financial-related services.

As the prepaid card market has matured, it has become a "business not for the faint of heart or haphazard investor" because of regulatory scrutiny and competition's effect on pricing, according to Aite Group.

A Baby Boomer who has banked with the same small financial institution for more than 37 years hardly fits the mobile profile. But look below the surface and this mom is actually a prime candidate.

MasterCard Inc. and PayPal have positioned themselves as companies with “the best current opportunities in the payment space,” according to Morningstar Financial Services.

Ally Bank expanded its use of Fiserv's Popmoney person-to-person payments service, allowing consumers to send and receive funds from the bank's mobile banking app.

If consumers were worried about a government shutdown or stalled debt ceiling talks affecting the economy, they didn’t show it by holding off on credit card spending in October, a First Data Corp. report indicates.

The number of credit cards issued by banks and retailers hit five-year highs between January and August, according to the latest Equifax National Consumer Credit Trends Report.

Electronic payments provider ACI Worldwide inked a nine-year extension to service 24,000 ATMs across the U.K. for VocaLink, the country’s payment infrastructure provider.

The Federal Reserve Board has approved a deal for prepaid card issuer Green Dot to buy GE Capital’s Walmart-branded prepaid debit card business, according to a statement the Fed posted online Nov. 22.

Through an expanded partnership between MasterCard and Green Dot, U.S. consumers holding a MasterCard prepaid card can reload the account through the Walmart Rapid Reload service.

InStore, an iPad-based mobile point of sale provider, has launched Gift Card Merchant, a free app for Apple devices that allows merchants to design physical gift cards to be printed.