Payments

The biggest trend in merchant acquiring this year is a concentration on developing and selling mobile card acceptance to micromerchants, a new report suggests.

Isis, the wireless carrier-led mobile-payments venture, just crossed off a relatively small but integral item on its to-do list in signing Visa Inc., American Express Co. and MasterCard Worldwide to its system.

Isis, the mobile carrier-led mobile payments venture that initially planned to compete against incumbent payment networks, now has formed relationships with them, it announced July 19.

U.S. Bancorp has increased its mobile-banking options for prepaid card customers.

Continuing efforts to get its Serve digital wallet into consumers’ hands, American Express Co. has signed a deal with Sprint Nextel to put the payments application on the Sprint Zone website, where Sprint customers go to manage their mobile-phone accounts, Amex announced July 18.

Citicorp’s net credit losses dropped 27% to $2.2 billion during the second quarter, driven by Citi-branded cards in North America, John Gerspach, Citi chief financial officer, told analysts during a Friday conference to discuss the quarter’s earnings.

WILMINGTON, N.C.-Two weeks following the Fed's final interchange ruling, CU attitudes toward the future of debit could be changing, shedding some of the doom and gloom predictions and now working to leverage what some believe could be one of the biggest opportunities to win new members in years.

BELLEVUE, Wash.-From shifting members to signature from PIN, to cutting rewards, or adding enhancements to attract new members, no clear-cut strategies are emerging as CUs make decisions to address debit programs post-Durbin.

FAIRHAVEN, Mass.-One CU believes that moving more debit transactions from PIN to signature will drive greater interchange revenue and has introduced a cash giveaway to get members to change their behavior.

SAN FRANCISCO-As merchants in the United States continue to resist replacing magnetic stripe plastic cards with modern chip and PIN models, one fraud expert believes the "EMV" solution will never gain critical mass in this country.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security warned last week about a vulnerability in the way Apple's iOS devices such as the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch deal with PDF files.

NEW YORK – The final parameters of an antitrust settlement submitted to a federal court here Friday by the Department of Justice promises to give merchants and cardholders more choices when paying for goods and services by preventing Visa and MasterCard from enforcing anti-steering bylaws.

Mobile-based payment services could account for US$350 billion in payments and banking transactions in India by 2015, producing fee income that could exceed US$4.5 billion, a new report suggests.

As his company continues its mission to replace wallets and traditional payment terminals, MobilePayUSA CEO Randy Smith believes his company’s Virtual Terminal represents “more than a new way to pay; you are getting payments and marketing.”

Demand is far outstripping supply these days in mobile remote deposit capture, new research suggests.

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Card Services unit Thursday reported a strong increase in second quarter profits and spending volume, powered by credit card customers using their cards for routine spending while paying off their outstanding balances at a higher rate.

The march of mobile banking has moved more slowly in the U.K. than in other countries, but NatWest and RBS have moved more quickly than others. They were among the first to offer native smartphone apps, and this week became the first two U.K. banks to offer native iPad tablet apps.

The college crowd isn't as hip with credit card issuers these days.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Star One CU is the first credit union to introduce a Visa-branded EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) chip-and-signature card provided by Jack Henry & Associates’ JHA Payment Processing Solution.

To sign up for a Dwolla account and integrate it with a credit-union account was a fairly tedious process that could take two to three days–until FiSync came along to streamline the task to less than a minute.