Cards

Count the Federal Reserve Board’s restrictions on debit card interchange fees that take effect Oct. 1 as yet another reason for banks to close branches.

Does Bank of America Corp. plan to charge for debit card use at the point of sale because it is shortsighted or because it is too bloated to compete against smaller institutions for consumer accounts?

Bank of America Corp., the nation’s largest issuer of debit cards, plans to start charging its checking customers $5 per month, or $60 annually, if they use their debit cards to make purchases.

Banks have long argued that processing debit card transactions by starting with the largest dollar balances and working their way to the smallest benefited customers. But a popular vendor of "high-to-low" debit transaction processing software has an alternative explanation of what might have motivated them: "Multiple Millions $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$."

Euronet Worldwide Inc.’s epay division has signed an exclusive agreement to process prepaid mobile airtime transactions in the independent retail segment for Sprint Nextel Corp.’s Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile USA and Assurance Wireless no-contract wireless brands, the Leawood, Kan.-based company announced Sept. 29.

The vast majority of companies continue to fall short of complying with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard during their initial audit, with 79% failing and only 21% getting a passing grade, contends a report Verizon Communications Inc. released Sept. 28.

A transit open-loop fare collection pilot in New Jersey that uses a Visa-branded prepaid debit card could help change the traditional notions about how to distribute a general-purpose reloadable product to financially underserved consumers, notes an industry observer.

Patients who may avoid paying medical bills because of confusion over what they owe and what the insurance company will pay may benefit from a new online payment tool.

BillMyParents Inc., which operates a parent-controlled teen prepaid card, is working with MasterCard Worldwide on a new educational campaign that touts the benefits of SpendSmart, MasterCard’s program that enables parents to control and monitor their teens’ spending.

Borrowing money from a friend for a taxi ride, splitting the restaurant bill among a group of diners or sending funds to a student at college could become an easier and faster task through a new mobile-payment option Visa Europe is launching this week.

ACI Worldwide Inc. has extended its exchange offer for shares of S1 Corp. until Oct. 31.

Mitek Systems Inc. has launched a single platform for remote deposit check capture and has formed a partnership that will help banks using its product fight duplicate-check fraud, the San Diego-based company announced Sept. 27.

Isis announced on Sept. 27 that several companies will launch mobile devices that implement its NFC and technology standards.

Payment-technology provider Fuze Network Inc. believes it has an answer for consumers who would prefer to use cash to pay their credit card bills: use the credit card.

Adding to the opposition against National Credit Union Association’s proposal to require financial reporting from credit union service organizations, Credit Union 24 is organizing a letter-writing campaign urging withdrawal of the initiative.

When battling data breaches, banks might want to start thinking small.

More financial institutions have done away with free checking accounts or have raised the minimum-balance requirements to avoid the charges, and the fees they are applying to accounts are up this year, new research shows.

Banks tend to look at competitors in mobile payments with a wary eye, but they would be better off working with one segment of this group–telecommunication network providers, suggests Ernst & Young’s new report “Mobile Money 2011 (see report).

Independent ATM provider YourCash Ltd. will target supermarkets throughout Belgium as testing sites for new ATMs as it expands an ongoing program of in-store deployments with European payments processor Equens SE, the companies announced Sept. 20.

CHICAGO—Last week, the PCI Security Standards Council pushed advanced encryption as a way to protect consumers’ card data. But one point-of-sale vendor executive contends authentication at every step of the payments process would work better to combat fraud.