Cards

It's shopping season in the payments industry. Just last month, Ingenico, ACI Worldwide and Fidelity National Information Services announced separate acquisitions. Many other companies have bought their peers in recent months.

Visa Inc. has featured the San Francisco 49ers all season in a humorous TV commercial based on a fanatic 49ers fan somehow making his way into the team locker room to deliver a fiery pep talk.

The portion of the population that relies heavily on cash is seeing new ways to use more mainstream financial services, including methods to better load cash onto stored-value cards.

Western Union is expanding its relationship with MasterCard on two fronts, by focusing narrowly on tax preparation stores with a prepaid card and expanding its remittance program in Latin America.

NEW YORK – A U.S. appeals court yesterday declined to hear a review of a lower court’s preliminary approval of the landmark antitrust suit against Visa and MasterCard, insisting it won’t hear the appeal until a final decision is rendered by the lower court.

Profits at the prepaid card issuer Green Dot fell sharply in the fourth quarter but still came in higher than analysts had expected.

Data security provider iovation Inc. has released two-factor phone authentication software it says will provide extra protection for consumers making online purchases.

MasterCard continues to ride the plastic wave in worldwide payments. The Purchase, N.Y., company on Jan. 31 reported fourth-quarter net income of $605 million, driven in large part by growing use of its credit and debit cards outside of the United States.

The Merchant Advisory Group is calling for a shift in deadlines for EMV acceptance in the U.S. — one extra month for every month the payments industry fails to find a common code for handling EMV debit transactions.

Numerous merchants don't realize their systems accept Discover, prompting the network to visit their stores in person to ask that the retailers stop turning down its cards.

ACI Worldwide and Fidelity National Information Services each announced acquisitions of companies that provide payments technology.

MasterCard Inc., the second-biggest U.S. payments network, posted fourth-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates as customers made more purchases.

Boston-based independent sales organization Merchant Warehouse is launching its Genius payment acceptance product for general availability. The system has been in testing since June 2012.

The council announced Jan. 31 its guidelines for e-commerce data safety. The information is a result of research completed by the council's e-commerce security special interest group.

Visa shareholders rejected a proposal Wednesday that would have required the nation’s largest card network to disclose publicly more information about its lobbying activities, according to the activist shareholder group behind the measure.

American Express Co. finds itself swirling in the middle of anti-trust litigation and proposed settlements that the company isn't directly a party to.

CO-OP Financial Services hopes the model used in one of the oldest staples of credit union cooperation, the shared branch, can drive new digital commerce innovation such as person-to-person payments.

Visa Inc.’s board of directors named Robert W. Matschullat as independent, non-executive chairman of the world’s largest payments network.

Fraud losses on U.S. credit and debit cards, after years of decline, now appear to be on the rise again. And one key culprit, according to experts, is this country's slow adoption of technology that will improve security.

Mobile banking is the wave of the future. It's also the future of everything from Google's Wallet to Jack Dorsey's Square to eBay's PayPal. How long mobile payments will remain largely a technology of the future — and how quickly they'll become part-and-parcel of the here-and-now — depends largely on how quickly consumers make them their own.