Cards

Malaysia’s CIMB Bank Bhd. and telecommunications company Celcom Axiata Bhd. have formed a partnership to speed up how quickly the telco’s customers can pay their mobile bills, according to the Kuala Lumpur-based bank

Motorists in Sharjah, the third-largest emirate of the United Arab Emirates, soon will be able to renew their parking smart cards and pay fines at self-service machines in the city’s malls, a spokesperson for the Sharjah Municipality Transport and Freight Department tells PaymentsSource.

ElectraCard Services Pvt. Ltd. has signed on to participate in MasterCard Worldwide’s Partners in Prepaid program, the India-based provider of software services for electronic payment systems announced in a statement last week.

Industry groups continued their full-court press Wednesday to keep an interchange provision out of the final regulatory reform bill, but whether they could succeed was an open question.

MasterCard Inc. announced Wednesday that it has formed a joint venture with Smart Hub Inc. to develop a global mobile payment system.

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.