Credit

The U.S. average credit card charge-off rate declined in August, resuming the general downward trend of the past two years following a slight uptick in July, according to a new Moody’s Investors Service report issued Sept. 23.

To cater to the growing number of Chinese travelers to Japan, China UnionPay is collaborating with Japan’s tourism office to offer services and deals to UnionPay cardholders.

Just as Discover Financial Services is discontinuing single-use account numbers, MasterCard Worldwide is making them a central feature of a small-business offering.

MasterCard for the past several years has been promoting its “priceless” experiences, such as behind-the-scenes access at ball games, golf tournaments, theater shows and other events. But its new “Priceless Cities” campaign, launched in New York in July, adds local and social-media dimensions.

Discover Financial Services is stepping away from its recent merger-and-acquisition frenzy and is trying to grow the old-fashioned way: by developing new businesses itself.

A London-based payment-processing and fraud-prevention company says it has created a way to detect fraudulent online credit card use more quickly by providing merchants and card issuers with identical cardholder data and transaction histories.

Discover Financial Services more than doubled its third-quarter net income to $649 million as its customers increased their spending and its credit card loan portfolio grew for the first time in over two years.

Fleet card provider Comdata Corp. has signed a deal with Warren Transport to provide payment services designed to reduce costs and create operational efficiencies, the companies announced Sept. 21.

Standard Chartered Bank India Pvt. Ltd. is adopting a more aggressive stancetoward the Indian credit card market thanks to positive changes in the market, a top bank official said on Sep. 19.

Merchants and processors may find Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council requirements for the use of advanced encryption hardware to secure card data useful, but encryption alone is not security’s “silver bullet,” fraud-prevention vendors say.

Protecting customer credit card data was not on the priority list for P.J. Jacokes when he started his own business three years ago.

NEW YORK–Consumers are sharing more personal information online than ever, but they do not want to share it with banks.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded FICO eight new patents, including one for a new system of predicting, detecting and managing financial transaction device fraud using mass compromise analytics that could determine which cards banks should reissue after a data breach.

West Bengal is planning to distribute a new credit card designed to provide credit to the Indian state’s small and midsize enterprises.

Standard Chartered Bank India Pvt. Ltd. is adopting a more aggressive stancetoward the Indian credit card market thanks to positive changes in the market, a top bank official said on Sep. 19.

Woori Finance Holdings Co. Ltd. plans to spin off its credit card business into a new company to diversify and bolster its nonbanking services, the South Korea-based issuer announced Sept. 18.

Spending with Visa-branded credit cards in China last year rose 23.7%, to US$4.7 billion from US$3.8 billion in 2009, thanks to a growing number of international travelers visiting the country, Visa Inc.’s China Tourism Outlook report said.

Google Inc. has reached agreements with Visa Inc., American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services with the goal of eventually enabling other financial institutions to add their Near Field Communication-enabled payment card products to Google Wallet, the company announced Sept. 19.

Indian banks, which over the last year began targeting more-upscale credit card customers who spend more and tend to stay current on their accounts, are seeing gains in credit card spending volume despite having fewer cards in circulation.

With privacy concerns about its mobile phone location-based credit card fraud-detection technology in Europe resolved, ValidSoft Ltd. has set its sights on entering the U.S. market within the next few months, the company CEO says.