Credit

To encourage cross-sales and improve customers' spending, PNC Financial Services Group has spent the past two years making its credit cards look like a seamless element of its Virtual Wallet account instead of a late addition.

Credit card issuers that cut consumers' credit lines or closed their accounts during the recession are opening credit lines again, but consumers do not appear very interested.

Banks and credit card issuers don't have a lot of followers on social media relative to their peers in other industries.

Community banks and credit unions with sluggish profits in their credit card portfolios may need to freshen up their strategies and let go of recession-era thinking.

Debate is heating up on the question of whether a nonworking spouse who relies on "household income" can qualify for a credit card account.

Signature Systems says its Swift Exchange platform can address a pain point for rewards wallets: rewards are easier for consumers to earn than to spend.

Subprime credit card borrowers are on the move again, opening significantly more new accounts than they did during the recession as lenders ease up on their ultra-tight underwriting standards.

Banks are in danger of having their lunch eaten by non-bank purveyors of new technology like the digital wallet, but there are significant opportunities as well, says Peter Kight.

The biometric security company SmartMetric has secured an additional $1 million in funding from investors.

American Express Co. continues to sweeten deals to drive repeat business from consumer and corporate cardholders.

Apple has over 300 retail stores, but it relies heavily on mobile devices — not just cash registers — to handle payments in its aisles. Intuit's latest update to QuickBooks Point of Sale allows its small-merchant clients to duplicate Apple's model.

Cartera Commerce has received $12.2 million in funding from a group of investors led by Comvest Group, the loyalty-shopping platform provider announced June 5.

Furnitureland South, a home-furnishings showplace based in Jamestown, N.C., has selected TD Retail Card Services to develop and administer its new private-label credit card, the retailer announced June 4.

Consumer gloom about the economy appears to be putting a damper on credit card borrowing.

The CEO of ZooZ admits that he wasn't thinking of the prominent Zeus malware, which targets bank accounts, when he named his payments company. But he was absolutely thinking of security.

Apple isn't the only game in town. Neither is Google. To allow mobile payments across all smartphone types, companies such as ZooZ encourage developers to use HTML5, the latest version of the HTML markup language.

Lower margins associated with debit card interchange and overdraft-protection fees is driving the U.S. banking industry to encourage more consumers to use prepaid and credit cards to pursue revenue. However, despite such moves, debit card payment volume will rise at a double-digit rate this year, a new report suggests.

Canada's payments industry is at a critical crossroads. Despite its significant strides in modernizing certain aspects of payment technology, the country's crucial regulatory issues are mired in fog.

How long can a good thing last? Write-offs of credit card loans already have plunged below levels issuers consider sustainable. Continued improvement in delinquencies points to a further dip in loss rates in the months ahead.

Thieves know: there's money in credit cards. Credit card numbers are still the hottest items stolen in data breaches, far surpassing debit card numbers and Social Security numbers, according to data from Javelin Strategy & Research.