Cards

Wilkes Barre, Penn.-based Cross Valley FCU has completed branding ATMs at two local Walgreens stores in Kingston and Scranton.

A Netherlands-based group consisting of banks and mobile operators has agreed to form a joint-venture company to support Near Field Communication mobile payments at the point of sale in 2012.

Card-not-present fraud in the United Kingdom is on track to decline 9% this year compared with last year as merchants and consumers adopt more strategies to thwart fraud, Retail Decisions PLC, a London-based payment fraud prevention firm, announced Sept. 6.

Standard Chartered Bank China Ltd. on Sept. 3 began issuing two debit cards designed for Chinese teenagers, becoming the first foreign bank to step into China’s emerging financial markets for teenagers.

ANZ Banking Group has launched an application for Apple Inc.’s iPhone that enables customers to transfer funds to other mobile-phone uses in Australia, an official for the Melbourne-based bank tells PaymentsSource.

Jack Henry & Associates Inc. announced Sept. 9 it is launching a person-to-person payment system based on technology from iPay Technologies, a company it bought in June. The service, called TheWayiPay, enables online-banking users to send funds to other individuals using only the recipient’s name and e-mail address.

VeriFone Systems Inc. on Sept. 9 announced the acquisition of encryption-services provider Semtek Innovative Solutions Corp., a company in which it previously provided equity funding.

If the U.S. government could mandate the switch to digital TV, why can't it mandate that credit and debit card issuers switch from magnetic stripe cards to the EMV Integrated Circuit Card Specifications to improve security?

The mobile payment tech company Vivotech Inc. said Wednesday that it is working with DeviceFidelity Inc. to provide contactless payment capabilities for smartphones that can accept microSD memory cards.

MasterCard Inc. on Wednesday released a dedicated application for BlackBerry owners who want to use MoneySend, the card company's mobile person-to-person payment system.

ViVOtech and DeviceFidelity announced a joint solution they say brings contactless mobile payment, loyalty, transit, ticketing and coupon redemption capabilities to leading smartphones, including BlackBerrys and iPhones.

Debit card use in the United Kingdom has surpassed other payment types as the preferred payment method, causing credit card, cash payments and especially check use to decline, the UK Payments Council reported on Sept. 9.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to reexamine a patent granted to InComm Inc. that is at the heart of a patent-infringement lawsuit, prepaid card provider Blackhawk Network announced Sept. 7.

Apriva, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based wireless-payments company, on Sept. 8 announced the release of its AprivaPay wireless point-of-sale application for Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

Australia’s taxation authority in September announced plans to seek contacts with various third-party providers to support its e-commerce payments.

Vodacom Pty. Ltd. is teaming with Nedbank Ltd. to launch the M-Pesa mobile cash-transfer service in South Africa, the mobile operator announced last week.

Transaction processor First Data Corp. expects to sign up more than 100,000 merchants by the end of this year for its new TransArmor payment card security product. TransArmor uses a combination of tokenization and encryption to secure transaction data as it passes through merchants’ systems.

Payments-software provider ACI Worldwide Inc. on Sept. 8 announced an extension and a broadening of its contract agreement with First Data Corp. The new agreement will enable the Atlanta-based transaction processor to more cost effectively develop products and drive infrastructure efficiencies in its global operations, ACI notes in a news release.

Obopay Inc. has struck a deal to route person-to-person funds transfers over First Data Corp.'s Star debit network, which accelerates the payments and could make the service more appealing to bank customers.

More banks should consider combining their debit and credit card rewards programs, which could better help them stave off customer attrition, according to the results of a survey released Tuesday by Synergistics Research Corp.