Credit

One payments company and four investor groups remain in the running for RBS WorldPay Inc., the merchant-services division of United Kingdom-based Royal Bank of Scotland, according to a source with knowledge of the process.

Turkiye Garanti Bankasi AS, the Turkish bank in which General Electric Co. has a 21% stake, reportedly will pay gold to customers who sign up for a new credit card, the Istanbul newspaper Star reported last week.

Card fraud has slowed to a crawl at Las Vegas-based Clark County Credit Union and CIO Roy Holmstrom is wondering whether he should thank his card-fraud prevention system for the good news.

Apple Inc. has the power to make mobile payments huge, but not quite in the way bankers hope.

The Single Euro Payments Area, an initiative the European banking industry launched in 2002 to link European Union and other euro-based countries’ separate national payment systems into a standardized system, remains a work in progress. And not everyone believes the European Payments Council, which is responsible for the initiative that has seen several delays already, can complete the task by December 2012, as the European Commission has proposed.

Benefiting from an overall improved global economy, American Express Co. yesterday reported a 102.5% increase in net income for the first quarter ended March 31, more than double what it earned a year earlier.

TazTag, a France-based contactless-product maker, will include a Near Field Communication chip inside its TazCard, a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen card, according to Inside Contactless, a France-based contactless-chip maker.

Citing improving performance in its pared-down portfolio, Capital One Financial Corp. on April 22 reported its credit card unit earned $489.6 million in profits during the quarter ended March 31, up dramatically from $3.3 million a year ago. Total revenue was $2.83 billion, up 4.8% from $2.7 billion.

Increased revenue in several international markets contributed to positive first-quarter revenue growth for Ingenico SA, a France-based company. The company’s payment-terminal business experienced revenue growth after being “severely impacted” by the difficult economy in 2009, while its transaction-services business “performed in line with” company expectations, Ingenico noted April 21.

The credit card charge-off rate rose again in March, reaching a point that is “at or near a peak,” Moody’s Investors Service said in a report this week.

Shares of eBay Inc. reportedly had their biggest drop in more than a year Thursday after the company posted first-quarter earnings that missed estimates.

The Standard Online Tourism Architecture network, an e-tourism platform used by more than 16,000 travel operators in Malaysia, has reached an agreement with U.S.-based eBay’s Inc.’s PayPal online-payments service to enable member travel agents to make or receive cross-border payments online, according to a statement from Creative Advances Technology Sdn. Bhd., the network’s creator.

Visa Inc. has launched the first Visa-branded, multifunction prepaid card in Singapore that enables users to pay for trips on Singapore’s public transportation system and for purchases at merchants that accept Visa cards for payment, the card company announced April 22.

American Express Co. churned out a first-quarter profit that was more than double what it earned a year earlier, as spending on its cards rebounded sharply and loan losses diminished.

U.S. bankcard issuers faced intense challenges in 2009 as the economy sank into a recession. Unemployment rates soared and home values tumbled, driving credit card charge-offs to hit new peaks, and consumers for the first time pulled back on credit card spending.

Apple Inc. has the power to make mobile payments huge, but apparently not quite the way bankers hope.

Canadian consumers will rely more on prepaid cards as consumer bankruptcies, industry losses and a voluntary code of conduct for the credit and debit card industries reshape the country’s payments industry, predicts Deloitte Canada’s Payments Practice in a report released April 22.

Nagoya Railroad, the transportation bureau of the Japanese city of Nagoya, and four other public-transportation companies are planning to launch a contactless transit card called Manaca for use by riders of trains, buses and subways in Nagoya. The companies expect to complete the launch by next February.

Georgia Power Co. customers may pay their electricity bills at self-service kiosks deployed in seven Best Buy Co. stores throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Since credit and debit card use began its rapid growth some 40 years ago, the way consumers pay for goods and services has evolved to mostly card payments from cash and check use. But credit and debit cards also are helping to increase economic growth by creating jobs and speeding up transactions, Moody’s Economy.com, a division of Moody’s Analytics Inc., reports in a recent study about the impact of electronic payments on economic growth.