Cards

Independent sales organizations should ensure the legal names and Internal Revenue Service taxpayer identification numbers of their merchant customers match the IRS files, Jill M. Miller, attorney at Jaffe Raitt Heuer & Weiss, P.C., advised attendees at the Northeast Acquirers Conference in Dover, Vt., this week.

Nearly a year after USAA Federal Savings Bank launched a service that enables customers to deposit checks into their accounts using images captured with cameras on their Apple Inc. iPhones, the bank last weekend launched the same service for Android-powered smartphones.

Cardtronics Inc. Wednesday signed an agreement with American Airlines Center to provide transaction-processing and support services for the building’s six ATMs, replacing Guaranty Bank, an Austin, Texas-based institution that failed last August.

Stored Value Solutions last week announced an agreement with World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. to provide both regular and promotional prepaid gift cards. Stored Value both issues the cards and processes the card transactions.

The city of Delhi in India soon may launch a smart card-based automated fare-collection system for its public bus service, an official from the service operator, Delhi Transport Corp., tells PaymentsSource.

Visa Europe said Wednesday that it plans to go to Hungary's Constitutional Court to appeal a bill passed in December by the Hungarian parliament that restricts bank card transaction commissions, reports Dow Jones.

Consumers who bank or initiate retail purchases online already can secure those transactions through a variety of means, including passwords used only for the Web, card readers that plug into personal computers or challenge-response procedures that can include images they preselect.

The debate over credit and debit card interchange this week went local when California State Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara, chairman of the state’s Banking and Finance Committee, conducted a hearing on credit card interchange rates.

Cardtronics Inc.’s agreement to deploy ATMs aboard five Carnival Cruise Line ships signals Carnival wants more control of the lucrative shipboard ATM business in which cardholders pay surcharge fees as high as $5 per cash withdrawal, says a Cardtronics rival.

Westpac New Zealand has awarded a nine-year contract to ATM vendor NCR Corp. to replace most of the bank’s existing ATMs, according to a statement from the Auckland-based bank. Terms were not disclosed.

Citizens of Dubai last year used the mPay mobile-payment service to make 8,380 payments worth 1.5 million dirham (US$408,386 or 289,894 euros), an official from Dubai government tells PaymentsSource. This represents a massive spike from 2008, when Dubai residents made only 298 mPay transactions worth 25,000 dirham, he says.

RegaloCard, a Miami-based mobile-payments company, has added two retailers–Universo Cellular in El Salvador and Cemaco in Guatemala–to its mobile funds-transfer network.

Users of China Mobile in Shanghai can now use their mobile phones to pay for their Metro transportation fares, according to a statement from the country’s largest telecom operator. The service will allow users to make payments at the turnstiles using mobile phones equipped to support contactless technology.

South Korea-based card company BC Card plans soon to begin expanding where its card are accepted overseas after inking a deal with Discover Financial Service to share credit card networks (see story) , according to a BC Card statement. The move will enable BC Card holders to use their domestic cards in other countries, including the United States, Japan and Singapore the statement notes.

Remote capture services have become an important offering for business customers, and banks are now adapting the technology for mobile phones in an effort to reach the mainstream.

In one of the most recent signs of the spread of so-called micropayments, U.S.-based start-up Boku Inc. late last year began enabling consumers in Estonia and Venezuela to pay for digital goods using mobile-phone accounts. A consumer who wants to buy virtual currency to acquire extra “lives” or goods useful in online video games, for example, would, after registering, make the purchase through the game provider’s Web site. The consumer would confirm the purchase through a text message, and the charge would appear on the consumer’s mobile phone bill, eliminating the need to use a payment card.

Card-fraud costs the U.S. payments industry, including issuers, merchants and acquirers, an estimated $8.6 billion per year, according to a recent report from Aite Group LLC, a Boston-based consulting firm. However, fraud amounts to only 0.4% of the estimated $2.1 trillion in U.S. card volume annually, according to the report “Card Fraud in the United States: The Case for Encryption.” Aite interviewed more than 30 fraud-management professionals for the report.

HSBC Holdings PLC’s rollout in the Asia-Pacific region of smart credit cards equipped with the EMV antifraud standard likely will help to increase the pace of EMV adoption this year in most markets, except the U.S., observers say .

U.S. Bancorp has hired Total System Services Inc. to provide card-processing services for its consumer-directed health care benefit cards.

India’s plans to have a domestic card-payment system will take another three years to roll out, an official from the National Payments Corp. of India tells PaymentsSource.