Cards

Merchant acquirers should be as concerned as the card brands over proposed legislation that would alter merchant fees, according to the Electronic Transactions Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group representing the acquiring industry.

Undeterred by Blippy’s embarrassing public exposure of certain customers’ credit card data, Swipely, another social-networking site broadcasting users’ credit and debit card purchases, on May 11 made its debut. But Swipely hopes to differentiate itself with a few new twists and promises of more-robust security.

Heartland Payment Systems Inc. intends to roughly double its sales force in the next 18 months to increase its presence in the restaurant, lodging and health care industries, according to the Princeton, N.J.-based merchant processor.

Square Inc. on May 11 announced its much anticipated payment card-acceptance software application for Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

Cash withdrawals from ATMs deployed in 15 central and eastern European countries grew at a much slower overall rate in 2009 than during the three previous years, and the reasons behind the drop are difficult to explain, researchers concede in a report issued May 10 by Retail Banking Research, a London-based strategic marketing firm.

Emirates NBD PJSC may sell a partial stake in its credit card-processing unit, according to local media reports, which say the Dubai-based financial group has hired a firm to advise it on the valuation of its Network International LLC subsidiary.

Obopay Inc. is all but abandoning the mobile transfer service it offers to consumers now that it's learned — maybe too late in the game — that banks are where the money is.

MasterCard Inc. said Monday that it has hired Andrew Ong to head its worldwide person-to-person money transfer efforts.

2010 will be remembered as the year that implementing mobile banking moved from being a get-on-the-bandwagon trend to table stakes in the American retail financial services market, the year that big banks began to recognize the channel's own legitimacy, and the year that most mid-tier and community banks put mobile banking on their short list of things to get done.

Now's an exciting time to be the bank executives charged with rolling out mobile banking. As industry fortunes rebound, funding is suddenly available at many financial institutions, and consumers' ever-increasing use of their ever-more-sophisticated mobile devices put institutions in the enviable position of rolling out technology just as consumers are ready to embrace it, as opposed to inventing tools and trying to motivate adoption.

Heartland Payment Systems Inc. experienced more merchant losses during the first quarter compared with previous quarters in part because of sustained economic weakness, the discontinuation of large individual merchants and shoddy management oversight of risk, according to Robert Baldwin, president and chief financial officer of the Princeton, N.J.-based processor.

Though industry observers generally expect mobile banking to become a mainstream technology with consumers, consumers ages 18 to 25 remain the biggest users of the service, new research suggests.

Banks and independent ATM deployers installed 169,003 ATMs in 15 central and eastern European countries last year, despite a dramatic slowdown in deployments in Russia, Europe’s largest ATM market, according to a report released May 10 by Retail Banking Research, a London-based strategic-marketing firm.

With fierce competition for merchants and slim margins in the U.S. acquiring market, more ISOs are expressing interest in penetrating the largely unsaturated Canadian market, according to Federated Payments, an independent sales organization with operations in the U.S. and Canada.

Despite the United States having a flat market for ATM sales, manufacturers NCR Corp. and Diebold Inc. still generated more revenue in the Americas during the first three months of this year than they did in the Asia Pacific and Europe/Middle East/Africa regions, according to a PaymentsSource analysis.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill. on May 6 introduced three interchange-related amendments to the Senate’s financial-reform bill, prompting swift criticism from the payments industry.

Diebold Inc. and NCR Corp. had good news for investors when the companies recently delivered their first-quarter earnings. Executives of the two ATM manufacturers told analysts smaller financial institutions were starting to take an interest in machines that accept envelope-free deposits.

Monett, Mo.-based Jack Henry & Associates announced this morning it has agreed to acquire iPay Technologies, the largest independent electronic bill pay provider in the U.S., from venture firms Spectrum Equity Investors and Bain Capital Ventures, for $300 million in cash.

ACH Federal, which offers Web-based electronic-payment processing services to community banks and small businesses, recently reported record growth in customer acquisition and in transactions it processes over the automated clearinghouse network.

Global Payments Inc. is offering merchants in five new Asian countries the ability to accept China UnionPay cards.