Cards

A start-up company’s contactless-payment wristbands have gained the backing of the Visa brand under a product launch announced July 27.

Diebold Inc. announced July 27 that its second-quarter net income dropped 33%, to $20.3 million from $30.4 million a year earlier. Revenue was down 0.4%, to $662.4 million from $665.2 million.

Shares in S1 Corp. traded higher when the markets opened this morning as Israel-based Fundtech Ltd. reminded investors that its agreement to merge with S1 Corp. has not been finalized yet and could fall prey to yesterday’s higher offer by ACI Worldwide to acquire S1.

A final rule the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network established July 26 to prevent prepaid products from being used to launder money appears to have struck a balance between the concerns of retailers, program providers and law-enforcement officials.

Wedding bells are ringing again for technology vendors, but many bank executives do not know on which side of the aisle to sit for their immediate buying decisions.

Revenue from electronic channels supported by The Western Union Co., including westernunion.com, account-based funds transfers and mobile funds transfers, grew by more than 35% during the second quarter, the company said in announcing its earnings for the period.

Cardtronics Inc.’s wholly owned subsidiary Cardtronics USA Inc. has completed its acquisition of EDC ATM Subsidiary LLC and Efmark Deployment I Inc., the ATM independent sales organization announced July 26.

Few of the security features designed to prove a credit card’s validity in the physical world work well online. One startup aims to change that.

Payments-technology vendor ACI Worldwide Inc. has submitted a bid to buy rival S1 Corp. for $540 million, aiming to thwart a separate deal S1 announced last month to merge with Fundtech Ltd., ACI announced July 26.

In a major new development in the country’s banking payments sector, Israel’s Postal Bank plans to launch a dual-currency prepaid card its accountholders may use to shop on overseas retailers’ websites, the financial institution announced earlier this month.

Observers have speculated that now that ISIS has signed on card networks Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express to work with its telecom members AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon on mobile payments, it will muscle out competing scheme Google Wallet. To date, Google has signed on one card network, MasterCard, and one telecom operator, Sprint, as well as Citi, First Data and sixteen merchants as tenant partners.

Signaling the opening of a new market for Chinese manufacturers and retailers, Alibaba Group Ltd. is working with Western Union to develop an online payment platform, the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce specialist announced earlier this month.

Varying opinions exist on how quickly mobile payments will grow in the U.S., but payments executives generally believe the technology could become a mainstream option for purchasing goods and services within 36 months, new survey data suggest.

Following its strategy to saturate the host countries of sporting events that it sponsors, Visa Inc. got an early start in Colombia in signing up merchants for marketing promotions in anticipation of the FIFA U-20 World Cup, which starts this week, PaymentsSource has learned.

Visa Europe’s credit card market share in the United Kingdom grew at a steady pace the past two years, and another favorable spike could occur leading up to the 2012 London Olympics, for which Visa is an official sponsor, a new report suggests.

USAA has already processed nearly $4 billion in mobile banking transactions in the two years it has offered its Deposit@Mobile smartphone app. The company is now expanding this service, which lets customers deposit checks by snapping pictures of them with their mobile device, to the iPad 2 and plotting a new wave of digital banking products.

Two-year-old mobile payment startup Dwolla has gone from zero to $1 million per day in transactions.

Credit card issuers wanting to improve profitability in the wake of the recession could get better results by looking more closely at their own fraud cases to determine specifically which type of fraud criminals are perpetrating and how to stop it, new research from Experian PLC suggests.

If a hacker gets into the cash-register software of a restaurant, captures credit card information and sells it on the Internet to counterfeiters all over the world, it could take months or years for police to pinpoint the source.

NCR Corp. saw increased demand for its core services worldwide during the second quarter as the ATM and kiosk maker continued to put emphasis on marketplace innovation to help win new business.