Retailers

American Express Co. and Verizon Wireless will integrate Serve, Amex’s digital payment and commerce platform, on many Verizon mobile phones and tablets, the companies announced Aug. 1.

State Bank of India Ltd. on July 28 became the first card issuer in the country to announce plans to convert its entire portfolio of magnetic stripe credit cards to EMV chip-and-PIN formats.

Visa Inc. is overhauling its pricing to spur merchants to route transactions its way and defend a dominant share of the U.S. debit card market, a position endangered by new regulations.

Helped by strong growth in purchase volume outside the U.S., Visa Inc. on July 27 reported healthy across-the-board fiscal third quarter transaction growth.

Despite a weak national economy and uncertainty over the debt ceiling, business apparently is booming for independent sales organizations.

Payments processor Heartland Payments System Inc. on July 28 said it expects its 2011 earnings to be higher than it previously forecasted after reporting a jump in second-quarter profit and sales.

American Express Co. has nabbed a former Google Inc. executive to run a joint venture with French e-commerce website vente-privee.com.

Hacking suspects may blame their arrests on having picked the wrong target.

Citing improving economic conditions, Total System Services Inc., or TSYS, on July 26 reported a 3.9% increase in second-quarter revenue, to $447.6 million from $430.8 million during the same period a year ago. Net income was $54.6 million, up 4% from $52.5 million.

Wedding bells are ringing again for technology vendors, but many bank executives do not know on which side of the aisle to sit for their immediate buying decisions.

Few of the security features designed to prove a credit card’s validity in the physical world work well online. One startup aims to change that.

Signaling the opening of a new market for Chinese manufacturers and retailers, Alibaba Group Ltd. is working with Western Union to develop an online payment platform, the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce specialist announced earlier this month.

Following its strategy to saturate the host countries of sporting events that it sponsors, Visa Inc. got an early start in Colombia in signing up merchants for marketing promotions in anticipation of the FIFA U-20 World Cup, which starts this week, PaymentsSource has learned.

Credit card issuers wanting to improve profitability in the wake of the recession could get better results by looking more closely at their own fraud cases to determine specifically which type of fraud criminals are perpetrating and how to stop it, new research from Experian PLC suggests.

If a hacker gets into the cash-register software of a restaurant, captures credit card information and sells it on the Internet to counterfeiters all over the world, it could take months or years for police to pinpoint the source.

As the hype for widespread Near Field Communication-enabled mobile payments continues to heat up, eBay Inc.’s CEO doused some cold water on the concept, suggesting instead that large merchants will resist the unproven technology.

Preventing a damaged reputation, more so than cost, is what drives online merchants to improve their data security and comply with industry standards. And more merchants are starting to use third parties to store their payments data to improve security and protect their reputations, new research suggests.

A federal judge on July 20 approved a settlement between the U.S. Department of Justice and Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide that bars the two networks from enforcing bylaws preventing merchants steering business to less expensive forms of payment.

Giftango Corp. wants to give merchants a head start on the mobile-wallet age by placing two-dimensional barcodes on the back of their proprietary, closed-loop gift cards to enable consumers to convert the plastic to a digital format via a smartphone camera, among other capabilities.

Ingenico SA has struck a deal with a point-of-sale equipment distributor that will help it expand availability of its products in the United States, the French payment-terminal maker announced July 19.