Cards

In an exclusive deal for MasterCard Worldwide, Indigo Books & Music Inc.’s plans to deploy terminals that accept the card brand’s PayPass contactless payments in all its stores marks the first such development for a retailer of its kind.

Jet Airways Ltd., India’s largest private airline by passengers carried, has begun offering a mobile-ticketing service for booking seats on its flights, a sign of continued expansion of mobile commerce in India.

Card companies have used celebrities and fun characters in their brand advertising for years to hawk their products as spokespeople, but integrating the celebrity brand into a card product may be better strategically for card-program success, one observer contends.

Mobile payments in India received a major boost on June 27 when Nokia India Pvt. Ltd., the Indian arm of the Finnish mobile handset maker, announced it would offer its Mobile Money service on all Nokia devices.

S1 Corp. and Fundtech Ltd. have not competed directly, but they sold to many of the same customers. As such, their announced merger would substantially boost the power of each company’s sales team as they pursue new markets and deepen existing customer relationships.

Another company has announced a mobile payments and marketing app in what some are calling the Wild West of mobile payments.

A San Francisco-based startup called Card.io is offering software that enables cell-phone cameras to scan credit card information, thus moving ecommerce from the Web to mobile phones and creating a new product for ISOs to sell to merchants.

Small and midsize businesses now have an alternative to traditional card-payment processing channels through a new mobile-payment processing service rolled out earlier this month by Australia’s Commonwealth Bank Ltd.

Two payment transaction software and service providers, S1 and Fundtech, have agreed to a "merger of equals" today in a deal valued at $700 million. Upon closing of the transaction, S1 shareholders will own approximately 55 percent and Fundtech shareholders approximately 45 percent of the combined company. The combined company will be headquartered at S1's headquarters in Atlanta and will be called Fundtech.

By itself the drop in deposit account service fees caused by the year-old consumer overdraft protections is a minor problem for FNB Inc. of Dennison, Ohio.

A major investor in Meta Financial Group has grown impatient with the company’s sagging stock price and is urging the Storm Lake, Iowa-based bank holding company to sell itself.

A San Francisco-based startup called Card.io is offering software that enables cell-phone cameras to scan credit card information, thus moving ecommerce from the Web to mobile.

BankSimple, which his nearing a soft launch of its Web-banking services, has signed two bank partners.

As consumers communicate more using social-media networks, credit card companies see the sites as new vehicles to tout their products and services.

Global technology vendor Serverside Group filed suit in federal court June 23 claiming dozens of credit union groups and banks are infringing on its patents for card customization technology.

MasterCard Worldwide continues to take a focused approach to Hispanic consumers thanks to its partnership with Univision Communications Inc., but Visa Inc. is banking on its overall prepaid marketing approach to target the segment.

Visa Inc. says its business "remains solid" in the face of pending restrictions on debit card interchange fees.

Using an ATM soon may be like a scene out of a science fiction movie.

Although mobile-payments venture Isis has publicly disclosed that it wants to add larger payments networks than its initial partner, Discover Financial Services, Discover says it might now be better positioned in the mobile-payments market.

PrepaYd Inc., a marketer of prepaid debit cards that operates under the name Bank Freedom, soon will begin offering its customers prepaid wireless phones and service to help create more customer retention around its card products, PaymentsSource has learned.