SAN DIEGO-Even as CUs place more resources toward fraud detection and prevention, home banking applications are not receiving the attention they need, according to one industry expert.

The latest forecast of mobile payment growth, from U.K. research company Visiongain, calls for $150 billion in mobile-phone-generated payments to take place globally by the end of this year. This is significantly larger than the estimate Gartner came out with last month, which predicted that worldwide mobile payment volume would total $86.1 billion in 2011.

Thieves made off with personal information of 92,408 Citigroup Inc. credit card customers in Japan and sold the data to third parties, Citi said Friday according to Dow Jones. It's the second data theft for Citi in three months and the latest sign of how vulnerable banks and their customers are in a world of high-tech banditry.

PRINCETON, N.J. – Heartland Payment Systems, Inc., said it will introduce a payments application and a card reader that attaches to a smart phone in the same manner as Square’s or VeriFone’s payWare Mobile readers.

WASHINGTON – Travelex Global Business Payments, Inc. and LendingTools.com on Thursday announced they are partnering to deliver international electronic payments solutions.

Visa Inc.’s new U.S. EMV initiative will have far-reaching consequences for merchants and card issuers, but the other card networks may not follow it exactly in drawing their roadmaps for migrating to advanced chip card technologies, certain observers say.

Consumer bankruptcies fell 18% nationwide in July compared with July 2010, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute, which pulls the data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center.

Most large U.S. merchants easily will comply with Visa Inc.’s first level of incentives to make payment terminals ready to accept contact and contactless EMV cards next year as part of the card brand’s U.S. push toward chip card technology, but it may take smaller merchants a year or two to get there, payment industry experts suggest.

When newly acquired card customers from HSBC’s U.S. card program and ING’s online bank are folded into Capital One Financial Corp.’s existing base, they will have a rapidly expanding array of digital transaction and payments channels from which to choose.

The battle for supremacy in mobile person-to-person payments is raging. To date, its primary ordnance has been limited to the press release and the corporate event, most of them volleyed by big-name operators of existing payment networks, such as PayPal Inc., Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide and Google Inc.

American Profit Recovery, a collection agency with offices in Massachusetts, Michigan and North Carolina, has earned Banker & Tradesman’s First Place Gold Award in the Banking Section/Asset Recovery category for the fourth consecutive year.

INDIANAPOLIS – Many of the bank customers responsible for the biggest overdrafts aren’t broke, they just happen to be big spenders.

OAK PARK, Ill. – A new study of mobile banking applications from major banks gave 25% a “fail” rating following a security audit.

Instead of dipping its toe into the mobile-payments pool, Heartland Payment Systems Inc. intends to make a splash with a retail application that can enable a merchant’s employees to complete sales transactions anywhere in or out of the store.

The U.S. government’s debt-negotiation struggles and the resulting stock market chaos following Standard & Poor’s Aug. 5 downgrade of the country’s sovereign debt likely will cause a “hiccup” in consumer credit card spending just as it was beginning to recover, a First Data Corp. executive tells PaymentsSource.

Visa Inc. has introduced a series of incentives to spur the U.S. to adopt chip cards–a change once considered as likely as the country switching to the metric system.

Visa Inc. plans to accelerate the U.S. migration to EMV contact and contactless chip technology, the card brand announced Aug. 9.

TransUnion Corp. on Monday reported revenue of $257.5 million for the second quarter ended June 30, an increase of 8.5% compared to the year-ago period. Of the increase, 1.4% was a result of the impact of strengthening foreign currencies.

Mobile-banking applications fared better than retail, productivity and social-networking apps, but banks still have work to do to protect customer data on mobile devices, a security audit released Aug. 8 suggests.

Bank stocks outpaced losses in the broader market Monday, following a familiar pattern. The volatility is likely to continue as the industry tries to earn its way past doubts about capital strength.