Aided by an improving economy, credit cards staged a comeback in 2012, edging out debit cards as the key payment option at the retail point of sale, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. While debit cards held the greatest share of total dollar volume at …

With little fanfare, Global Payments Inc. last week disclosed that the payment card networks had returned it their lists of processors compliant with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) following remediation efforts the merchant processor began after the data breach it disclosed a year ago. Atlanta-based Global Payments also …

  Fiserv Inc. executives expect the option to guarantee availability of funds loaded onto prepaid cards from a personal or business check using a smart phone to be a huge point of differentiation for Fiserv’s new Prepaid Source Capture service. Launched last week, the Brookfield, Wis.-based processor’s service enables consumers …

  Consumers making purchases with the Chicago Transit Authority’s coming Ventra combination transit and general-purpose MasterCard prepaid card are expected to incur maximum user fees of $8.45 in a given month, provided the cardholder triggers all the expected fees in that time period, according to processor First Data Corp. The …

  Merchant cash advances for online retailers suddenly are coming into vogue with the entry of PayPal Inc. into the market. PayPal recently disclosed that it plans to test in its home country a cash-advance program similar to one it has tested in the United Kingdom. Finance companies and merchant …

  Digital currency Bitcoin is making strides in its campaign to be viewed as a legitimate alternative to traditional payment methods. A major Bitcoin processor—Atlanta-based BitPay Inc.—yesterday announced it had processed more than $5.2 million in Bitcoin transactions for its e-commerce merchants during March. And earlier in the week, the …

  Can merchants make payment applications that run on smart phones secure? Yes, but only after they take some steps they might find to be difficult, according to an expert steeped in the intricacies of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI). “Smart phones were not built for taking payments, …

  Great news for mobile payments: the Federal Reserve says the percentage of consumers using a smart phone to make a purchase at the point of sale grew nearly threefold last year. Not-so-great news: don’t rely on that figure, because it’s too small to be statistically significant. Those and other …

  Consumers are paying fewer bills than they were in 2009, but paying more of them online and through mobile devices. Between 2009 and 2011 total consumer bill payments fell from 16.6 billion to 16.1 billion, according to a report released this week by Boston-based Aite Group LLC. The decline …

  American Express Co.’s announcement that its low-fee Bluebird prepaid card account will be eligible for insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and offer checking account features could be a move to win more business from its upscale core cardholder base as well as provide more services to Bluebird …