Cards

Hallmark Cards, better known for its greeting cards, has decided to sell its payment card subsidiary, Hallmark Business Connections, to InComm.

While major card issuers such as Chase and Wells Fargo roll out NFC-enabled credit and debit cards incrementally, Bank of America is taking a much more aggressive approach.

Mastercard has appointed Sasha Krstic president of its Canada operations.

Payment network tokenization should sound appealing to every online retailer because it relieves friction and releases them from much of their risk, liability and compliance burden. The trick is achieving scale from both a technical and business agreement perspective, writes Ammar Faheem, vice president of digital payment solutions for North America at Gemalto, a Thales company.

Banks and governments around the world have invested in systems that seek to instantly transfer money between accounts, moves that could put pressure on the sprawling debit card business at the world’s largest payments network. But Visa Inc. Chief Executive Al Kelly isn’t too worried.

Global Payments' purchase of TSYS is the latest merger of large payment technology companies — and by no means the last.

The Apple Card takes a more aggressively digital approach to credit card relationships than most other products on the market — but the technology behind it isn’t exclusive to Apple.

The most enlightened regulator or legislator can’t match the dynamic intelligence of billions of market decisions by consumers, merchants, banks, networks and processors, argues Eric Grover, a principal at Intrepid Ventures.

Petal's getting aggressive with its incentive marketing by approaching consumers with limited credit histories, and it's betting artificial intelligence can handle the higher risk.

Germans' devotion to cash is waning, as payments cards edged out cash for total transaction value in German retail sales in 2018.

Despite seismic shifts in the payments landscape over the last 45 years, how we handle chargebacks remains more or less the same, writes Monica Eaton-Cardone, COO of Chargebacks911 and CIO of its parent company Global Risk Technologies.

Wells Fargo & Co. said it expects to refund certain fees paid on debit-card accounts as it reviews disclosures that may have confused customers.

Over the past two years, Uma Wilson's strategy took a program that had been losing customers on a year-over-year basis and transformed it into the fastest-growing issuer of Visa cards in the region.

E-money provider Prepaid Financial Services has partnered with Garmin International for its digital prepaid cards to operate in the U.K. on compatible Garmin Pay smartwatches.

Apple Card's advantages are mostly available elsewhere, but Apple's marketing prowess will make it a formidable competitor, according to Jonathan Ebinger, a general partner at Blue Run Ventures.

Payments platform BizPayO is launching an online cash flow tool it says will help small and medium-size business owners tackle what amounts to a $3 trillion late-payment problem annually that undermines operations.

Much like Visa's CEO, Mastercard's top executive is viewing the recent mergers in the payments industry as a chance to build partnerships rather than a competitive threat.

While a majority of business payments are still made by checks, faster payments and increased cash flows will pressure a move to digital options, contends UMB's Brian Hutchin.

The use of digital payments offers significant savings over check cashing. Payroll cards and public-sector prepaid cards issued for the deposit of government benefits are two of the best known examples, writes Andrew Gillen, vice president for Global Public Sector Payment Solutions for Mastercard.

NatWest has started a three-month testing period of a payment card using biometric fingerprint for authorization with 200 customers, saying it is the first such card issued by a U.K. bank.