Mobile banking, and by extension mobile payments, have rapidly crossed the line from add-on to necessary products for financial institutions, speakers and other sources at a banking-technology expo said on Wednesday. The primary reason mobile has assumed such importance has more to do with fear of attrition than with revenue …

The storm clouds over prepaid card program manager NetSpend Holdings Inc.’s IPO caused by regulatory problems at MetaBank, the prepaid card program manager’s main issuing partner, cleared Monday, enabling NetSpend to go through with the stock offering at the mid-point of its projected price range. And on Tuesday afternoon, NetSpend’s …

PayPal Inc.’s 1-year-old person-to-person payment application for financial institutions is catching on with banks, says the PayPal executive charged with marketing the product, part of a collection of payment services PayPal introduced when it opened its platform to outside developers last year. Dan Schatt, senior director and head of financial …

Two years after talk started that the major card networks had designs on Canada’s debit card market, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Visa Canada announced Monday that CIBC was introducing the country’s first Visa-branded debit card. The card, dubbed the CIBC Advantage Card, is good in Canada only for …

While tales of unemployment, foreclosures, and other economic woes abound, some payments-industry reports indicate that consumers are coming out of their shells and spending more than they did a year ago, though the picture is still mixed. JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Wednesday reported that its mega merchant-acquiring subsidiary Chase …

TCF National Bank’s federal lawsuit against the controls on debit card interchange contained in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law draws scant sympathy from retailers who have been battling against card interchange, including a merchant and entrepreneur who has been leading a crusade against the pricing mechanism for years. “It’s nonsense,” …

Banks are abandoning their dreams of ATMs generating profits and instead returning to their original focus of using the machines for customer service, according to new findings from First Annapolis Consulting Inc. Linthicum, Md.-based First Annapolis spoke with executives from the nation’s 10 largest banks by assets about their ATM …

Federal banking regulators this month cracked down on MetaBank, a major prepaid card issuer, an action that threw into question the pending initial public offering of prepaid card program manager NetSpend Corp. Austin, Texas-based NetSpend is scheduled to price its long-planned IPO on Thursday, according to reports on the financial …

TCF National Bank, a top 10 debit card issuer, on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the so-called Durbin Amendment, which, as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill Congress passed in July, will regulate debit card interchange beginning next year. TCF alleges the debit card provisions …

Just as financial institutions were digesting the idea of letting consumers deposit checks by snapping images of them with their handsets, along comes PayPal Inc. with the first such application offered by a non-bank—and one that has so far proven to be quite popular. San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal announced late …