Cards

Some bus passengers in the Vietnamese capital of Ho Chi Minh City soon will be able to pay their fares using a contactless smart card as part of test of the technology, an official from the city’s transport authority tells PaymentsSource.

Indian Overseas Bank has launched its first mobile ATM as part of its drive to expand access to the institution’s services, an official from the Chennai, India-based bank tells PaymentsSource.

Miami-Dade Transit has begun to offer consumers commemorative Super Bowl transit smart cards for the area’s transit system. Transit officials hope the initiative helps promote use of the agency’s smart card system, which launched last fall.

Citing rising interest from its clients, commuter benefits provider Accor Services USA has added a prepaid debit transit and parking card as part of its services.

Visa Inc.'s profits jumped by a third in its fiscal first quarter, which ended Dec. 31, and use of the company's debit and credit cards picked up in the U.S.

Western Union Co., the world's biggest money-transfer business, has reported that its fourth-quarter profit fell, and it forecast little or no revenue growth for 2010.

Diebold Inc. Wednesday announced a restructuring of its North American operations as ATM sales to regional banks remained flat, contributing to dramatic drops in revenue for the fourth quarter and for all of last year.

Card readers that attach to mobile phones suddenly have become a hot industry topic, and HomeATM ePayment Solutions is about to throw its own device into the mix, PaymentsSource has learned.

American Payment Systems increased compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard among its roughly 1,200 merchant clients to 48% currently from roughly 10% Oct. 1 with a phone-call campaign, according to the Omaha, Neb.-based independent sales organization.

A member of New Orleans Firemen’s Federal Credit Union pleaded guilty to stealing $3,400 from the credit union after electric outages caused by 2005's Hurricane Katrina forced the credit union to go offline with its ATM services.

Last year, 45 credit unions joined Credit Union 24 Inc., the nation’s largest credit union-owned point of sale and surcharge-free ATM network. The credit unions, located in 19 states in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest and Northwest, represent $4.9 billion in assets and 620,000 members, CU 24 executives said in a statement.

State Bank of India has launched a network-branded prepaid card in Hyderabad, India, an official from the Mumbai-based bank tells PaymentsSource.

Gemalto NV said Tuesday that it would provide chip cards to BNP Paribas SA in France and Belgium, expanding an existing relationship.

U.S. Bancorp's merchant acquiring operations are getting into Mexico on the ground floor.

Watch for healthier credit and debit sales volumes when Visa Inc. tomorrow reports its most recent quarterly data, with MasterCard to follow on Thursday, one analyst says.

Some payments organizations want the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service to clarify aspects of a law that takes effect next January requiring acquirers to report merchant credit and debit card transactions to the IRS, and they want penalty fees mitigated in the early stages of enforcement, according to comments submitted to the government agencies.

JetPay LLC, a Carrollton, Texas-based payment processor, says it has won a trademark-infringement issue involving its Web site address, www.jetpay.com.

Payment Alliance International has acquired the ATM-processing business of WRG Services Inc., a Willoughby, Ohio-based ATM independent sales organization, Louisville, Ky.-based Payment Alliance announced Monday.

Debit card customers of Dutch Bangla Bank Ltd. face paying a 3 taka fee (43 U.S. cents or 31 euro cents) for taking a transaction receipt at the bank’s ATMs under a new policy that took effect last month, an official from the Bangladesh-based bank tells PaymentsSource.

Not all marketing tactics merchant-service providers use are equally effective at piquing merchants’ interest, some observers note. Independent sales organizations often go through multiple marketing techniques to determine which ones are less effective.