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The South Florida Regional Transportation Authority this week awarded a $15 million transit smart card contract to Cubic Transportation Systems Inc. San Diego-based Cubic will design and install the system that will be compatible with the contactless Easy Card launched in October in Miami-Dade County.

About 29% of New Zealanders expect to use credit cards to pay for otherwise unaffordable expenses in the coming months, a survey from credit-reporting agency Dun & Bradstreet reveals.

Guangshen Railway Co. Ltd. is partnering with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and card issuer China Unionpay to jointly issue a dual-currency contactless credit card in Hong Kong, the companies announced in recent joint statement.

Barclaycard next month plans to launch Barclaycard Freedom, a cash-based credit card rewards and loyalty program, through partnerships with more than 30,000 local and international retailers, the London-based card-issuing unit of Barclays Group PLC announced recently.

Bottomline Technologies said Wednesday that it has agreed to purchase Bank of America Corp.'s travel commission payments service.

The House Financial Services Committee does not plan to pursue interchange legislation this year, according to committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass.

Wright Express Corp., a payment-processing company for commercial and government vehicle fleets, recently reported a 3.6% rise in revenue for last year’s fourth quarter, to $83.8 million from $80.9 million during the same period a year earlier.

Thai Airways International on Feb. 15 began accepting credit cards for ticket payments in Australia, an official from the airline’s ticketing department tells PaymentsSource. The card brands accepted include American Express, Diners Club, Master Card and Visa.

China Unicom will officially launch its Near Field Communication service later this year in Shanghai, confirms a Shanghai-based official from the nation's second-largest mobile network carrier.

Small-business owners do not expect any major improvement in the economy in the next few months, according to data from Discover Financial Services.

Two companies that support online payments are getting involved with Facebook Inc. to streamline micropayments for virtual goods users purchase on the popular social networking Web site.

Target Corp. is not alone in testing the effect of various benefits associated with its private-label credit and debit cards and its co-branded Visa card (see story), one analyst says.

Visa Inc. this week launched a program called Visa Signature Luxury Hotel Collection that provides holders of its branded Signature cards more global travel benefits at various high-end hotels and resorts in Dubai and Thailand and at domestic destinations such as south Florida and New York.

Many organizations, such as banks, local business associations, Web-site designers and software developers, refer their customers to independent sales organizations and acquirers for merchant-processing services. The ISO or acquirer then shares with those organizations a percentage of its processing revenue. Or it may provide the referring organization a one-time finder’s fee when the merchant begins processing transactions.

VeriFone Holdings Inc. is supplying 130,000 payment products to Russian bank Sberbank in a multimillion-dollar deal announced today, according to the San Jose, Calif.-based payment-terminal manufacturer. Sberbank is Russia’s largest bank.

Chinese consumers spent more 56.9 billion yuan (US$8.3 billion or 6.1 billion euros) using their debit and credit cards during the week-long Chinese New Year, up 45% from 39.2 billion yuan during the same period last year, data from card company China Unionpay reveal. The holiday week started Feb. 14 and ended Feb. 19.

Fair Isaac Corp. said Tuesday the oft-noted trend of consumers' defaulting on mortgages while continuing to pay their credit cards has spread to the most creditworthy borrowers,reports Bloomberg News.

Merchant-portfolio sellers that harbored visions of selling their portfolios at 36 times their monthly residual revenue finally have acquiesced to buyers’ demand to pay less, say observers of the acquiring market. Residual revenue is the recurring transaction revenue acquirers collect from merchants.

Sales agents for independent sales organizations increasingly are seeking additional industry training to improve their abilities to better compete for scarce business during the difficult economy, observers note.

Some independent sales organizations are providing qualified leads to sales agents as incentives so they will work harder. The tactic tends to motivate the agents while enabling the ISO to spend less on incentives than they would through monetary bonuses, according to some observers.