Consumer credit card debt fell by 10% during the first half of the year and by 17% from a year earlier, totaling $6,472 in June, according to data Credit Karma released July 13. The average credit score has remained steady at 667, down just two points from 665 in June 2010.

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.

Issuers seeing the first signs of growth in consumer credit card borrowing in nearly three years might be hoping the long drought is over, but it is too soon to celebrate, analysts say.

Banks and credit card companies are likeliest to succeed in mobile payments, contend business executives surveyed recently.

With a 98% retention rate, USAA Federal Savings Bank seems to have little room to improve customer service for its payments and other operations. But it has spent the past two years and millions of dollars overhauling systems to do just that.

CoVantage Credit Union is working with the software vendor Tyfone Inc. to make its customers’ wallets more mobile.

Not many companies are doubling their business estimates for the next year, but PayPal Inc. has done just that by projecting a 100% upside for mobile payments. Today it pushed the gas even harder by making Near Field Communication technology available as part of peer-to-peer payments.

Signaling plans to stick with its strategy of diversifying beyond its core general-purpose credit card operations, Capital One Financial Corp. on July 13 said its second-quarter purchase volume rose and its charge-off rate fell, partly as a result of its acquisition of the Kohl’s Corp. private-label credit card operation.

The Chicago area’s regional transportation systems have until 2015 to develop a universal transit fare system commuters could use across three different schemes under legislation signed into law last week.

Call it a need for “consolidation education” among at least one in every four credit cardholders in the United Kingdom who carry balances but who are unaware of other loan products to consolidate their card debt.

With Canada being one of the world’s more developed contactless-payments markets in terms of cards issued, more merchants there are starting to accept the tap-and-go transactions, the latest being 1,400 McDonald’s restaurants, which will do so starting this summer.

The U.S. may lag other countries in mobile-payment availability and use, but the rate of activity surprisingly is high, new survey data suggest.

HOUSTON – Cardtronics has signed a multi-year licensing deal with I-design for the company’s joono targeted marketing software for use on Cardtronics ATMs.

SAN ANTONIO – Generations Community FCU has implemented Jack Henry & Associates’ iPay consumer bill pay solution.

VANCOUVER, Wash. – Columbia CU has installed mFoundry’s SaaS-based mobile banking platform.

BATON ROUGE, La. – Neighbors FCU said yesterday has selected Geezeo to provide a personal financial management solution and integrated marketing platform.

As potential buyers kick the tires of a few big credit card portfolios on the block, the issuers’ private-label card operations for the first time in years could be an advantage, instead of a drag, thanks to changes in the economy and in industry regulations, observers say.

Regions Bank in Birmingham, Ala., is teaming with Fiserv Inc. to use the vendor’s person-to-person payment system ZashPay to enable its customers to transfer funds to family members, friends and other individuals electronically.

In the latest phase of Citi’s efforts to hire leaders from the retail world (including Tracey Weber from Travelocity and Frank Eliason from Comcast), the bank has hired Omar Khan, CTO at Samsung Mobile, to head mobile initiatives on a global basis. Khan is said to have led Samsung’s moves into the Android space.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Empower FCU has implemented VSoft’s suite of item capture solutions, including merchant remote deposit capture and branch back-counter capture.