Retailers

Hypercom Corp.’s preview of its fourth-quarter earnings Feb. 16 raised fears about the viability of VeriFone Systems Inc.’s plans to acquire its competitor in the second half of the year.

Having successfully nudged lawmakers to reconsider interchange caps, card issuers and payments networks are weighing the ramifications of another, less-discussed part of the Durbin amendment: so-called steering rules.

A glance at fraud statistics would seem to yield an obvious answer: the United States needs to catch up with the rest of the world and upgrade old-school magnetic stripe cards to modern chip and PIN models.

Mobile-network operators NTT Docomo Inc. of Japan and KT Corp. of South Korea have inked a deal to support Near Field Communication payments for smartphones in the two countries that use Google Inc.’s Android operating system.

The Australian capital territory of Canberra plans to roll out the MyWay smart card ticketing system on its Action bus service starting Feb. 21, a spokesperson at the bus operator tells PaymentsSource.

Financial institutions and consumers will be able to more quickly detect and respond to fraudulent transactions and suspicious bank-account activity using a mobile-based fraud-management service ClairMail Inc. has developed, the San Rafael, Calif.-based company announced Feb. 17.

Until a few years ago, payment card processors and merchant acquirers found it relatively easy to incorporate biannual April and October updates of interchange-rate tables and other mandates from the payment networks into their systems.

Hypercom Corp., which is being acquired by VeriFone Systems Inc., said in a regulatory filing Feb. 14 that the combined companies should generate nearly $2 billion in revenue next year.

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.

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.

Hypercom Corp.’s stock rose slightly in morning trading Feb. 16 after the payment-terminal maker reported preliminary fourth-quarter net revenue of $140 million, up 19% from a year earlier.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Garanti Bank is using VeriFone Systems Inc.’s Near Field Communication/contactless PIN-pad system in its nationwide rollout of an NFC mobile-payment initiative in Turkey, the payment-terminal maker announced Feb. 14.

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.

Hypercom Corp., which is being sold to VeriFone Systems Inc., said in a regulatory filing Monday that the combined companies should generate nearly $2 billion in revenue next year.

Merchant surcharges for debit and credit card purchases in the United Kingdom are unfair, and merchants should be upfront regarding any additional fees they might charge, contends Which?, a UK-based consumer-protection advocacy group.