Payment processing

In a warm-up for tomorrow’s Capitol Hill hearing on the Federal Reserve Board’s proposed debit-interchange rules, merchants’ representatives during a press conference today said that unless the rules are left unchanged, merchants might be forced to lay off employees.

Better-than-expected merchant reaction to Intuit Inc.’s offer of free card readers and no monthly service fees to small merchants using its GoPayment mobile-payments service has prompted the company to extend the offer indefinitely, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced Feb. 16.

Economic improvements are helping Heartland Payment Systems Inc., which reported on Feb. 16 that higher spending led to a small jump in fourth-quarter net revenue.

As many as 1,000 credit union members around Maine are believed to have had their card accounts compromised and are now reporting unauthorized transactions on their accounts.

BB&T Corp. is launching a prepaid card that costs slightly more per month than some competing products — but lacks many back-end fees that have caught the ire of advocacy groups.

Deborah McWhinney, the head of Citigroup's flagging personal banking and wealth management group, is leaving her post after a tumultuous two-year run in which she attempted to makeover the nation's third-largest bank following the spin-off of its Smith Barney brokerage unit in 2009.

The powerful senator who sponsored last year’s amendment to the Dodd-Frank Reform Act regulating debit card interchange is confident his provision will stand, even as the House begins deliberations aimed at changing the provision, or at least delaying its enactment.

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s mobile check-deposit service stood out to the financial services industry as one of the few to make it to market without technology from Mitek Systems Inc. But now even Chase counts itself among Mitek’s growing list of customers.

MasterCard Worldwide plans to bring payment security to U.S. consumers through passcode-generating display cards, the card brand announced Feb. 14 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

This story has been updated from its original version.

Visa Inc. has joined forces with Starbucks Corp. in what may be one of the emerging mobile-payment industry’s first national promotions designed to improve a payment brand’s status within a mobile wallet.

VeriFone Systems Inc. has turned its PayWare Mobile point-of-sale service into the equivalent of a multipurpose Swiss Army knife for payment acceptance, a necessary step to introduce the device to a global audience, according to the San Jose, Calif.-based payment-terminal maker.

SecureKey Technologies Inc. has received an investment from Intel Capital of Santa Clara, Calif., Intel Corp.’s global investment unit announced Feb. 14.

Long satisfied with offering merchants a purpose-built wireless point-of-sale terminal, Matt Freedman, chief operating officer at Total Merchant Services Inc., realized last year his independent sales organization needed to offer more to meet the needs of a broader mobile-merchant audience.

The state of Kerala in India will be the first to test the Common Mobility Card, an endeavor of the National Urban Transport Policy of India designed to provide a single means to access all types of public-transport systems throughout the country.

MetroBank S.A. and Accertify, a leading provider of software, tools and strategies for preventing fraud, have formed a partnership to help merchants, banks and payment processors across Latin America to combat credit card fraud, the companies announced Feb. 15.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is teaming up with the image-capture vendor Mitek Systems Inc. to develop new applications for smartphones.

Some Bank of America Corp. customers saw other people's transaction details through online banking, a report said, but the company insisted that no fraudulent activity resulted.

Monitise PLC more than tripled its revenue during the six months ended Dec. 31 compared with the same period a year earlier as the mobile-payments company worked to expand its customer base.

VeriFone Systems Inc. is taking its PayWare Mobile point-of-sale service outside the United States for the first time and is adding acceptance for EMV chip-and-PIN cards and Near Field Communication-enabled devices, the company announced Feb. 14 at Mobile World Congress in Spain.