Cards

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., on June 9 made a brief appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, warning lawmakers of the need to investigate possible collusion between Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide in the setting credit and debit card interchange rates.

Representatives from credit unions and community banks during a June 9 press conference in Washington, D.C., exhorted lawmakers to exclude the debit-interchange amendment from the final financial-reform bill, claiming that altering debit-interchange rules likely would force them to raise overall banking fees charged to consumers.

One place exists where Christopher Kenyon, chief information officer and executive vice president of systems and technology at Elavon Inc., does not want to see his company’s name: in a headline for a story about a data breach.

Banks in India are replenishing their ATMs with cash more often because of a recent rules change enacted by the country’s central bank.

The recent changes in quarterly processing volume at Total System Services Inc. reflect the effects of an undulating global economy and market consolidation.

Issuers are fine-tuning their rewards strategies, using carrots that can encourage fiscal responsibility and help them weed out less-desirable accounts.

MasterCard Inc. announced Tuesday an online bill-payment service that prepaid card marketers can offer to cardholders.

Consumers are sending mixed views on whether they favor the debit-interchange amendment making its way through Congress as part of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act.

Merchant acquirers that fail to follow Visa Inc.’s safeguards to prevent processing certain high-risk merchants’ transactions face paying $100 per charge-back on top of regular penalty fees under a program Visa announced to its acquirers in March.

DimpleDough Inc. later this year plans to go live with an application that enables retailers to streamline business-to-business prepaid gift card offerings through an automated system.

Romanian police officials recently announced they arrested 20 individuals belonging to an alleged gang accused of manufacturing and selling skimmers placed on ATMs to capture the information off of payment card magnetic stripes, according to local press reports.

Executives from U.S. Bank opened the kimono yesterday at SourceMedia's 4th Annual Mobile Banking and Emerging Applications Summit, laying out the bank's mobile roadmap in great detail.

Bellco CU has signed an ATM outsourcing pact with Diebold, which will include upgrading its ATMs for enhanced deposit automation functionality.

The CPI Card Group is manufacturing the next-generation of mobile payment stickers for Discover Financial Services and MasterCard Worldwide, the Littleton, Colo.-based card producer announced last week. Both stickers use contactless technology from Inside Contactless SA.

More than 100 Ingenico S.A. point-of-sale terminals are afloat on 14 cruise ships operated by Costa Cruises as part of an initiative to enable travelers to use a “Costa Card” for their onboard purchases, Ingenico recently announced.

Efforts to create a common set of requirements for so-called “end-to-end” encryption moved forward last week when the Secure POS Vendor Alliance released its End-To-End Encryption Security Requirements.

Global mobile-payment services provider Mobibucks Pvt. Ltd. has inked a strategic-partnership deal with Emirates Net Systems LLC, an official from the Abu Dhabi-based information-technology provider tells PaymentsSource.

Faulu Kenya has inked a deal to enable its customers to withdraw cash from machines within the PesaPoint ATM network, the Kenya-based financial company announced recently.

Paymate Pvt. Ltd. plans to introduce its Green Money Transfer service to Sri Lanka by the end of this year, an official from the Mumbai-based mobile-payments provider tells PaymentsSource.

Lawmakers will return from their week-long Memorial Day recess this week right in the middle of a human scrum – hundreds of credit union executives crossing hundreds of retailers arguing over a key provision in the bank reform bill that would introduce government oversight of the market for cards interchange.