American Express Co. turned up the competitive heat in the gift card sector Wednesday by announcing the immediate elimination of monthly fees on all of its gift cards. AmEx also announced an expanded gift card program with shopping mall operator Simon Property Group Inc., the nation's largest public real-estate company …

A delegation from 7-Eleven Inc., including the convenience-store giant's chief executive and a handful of franchisees, cast the card-interchange issue as a matter of grassroots politics on Wednesday by personally delivering to lawmakers in the nation's capital petitions with nearly 1.7 million signatures calling for interchange regulation. The petitions, which …

With merchants looking to cut processing costs and clarify the pricing they pay for card acceptance, a Web site that lets merchants take bids from acquirers is generating between eight and 10 deals a month for at least some of the qualified processors using it. Chicago-based Transparent Financial Services LLC, …

A payments-industry security group formed earlier this year is going through the rather dry procedures of establishing a charter and electing leaders. But one of its first projects could get pulses beating a little faster: a simulated mass attack on databases containing payment card and demand-deposit account information. The exercise …

7-Eleven Inc. misled consumers who signed a petition asking Congress to regulate card interchange, MasterCard Inc. charged on Tuesday, one day before officials with the convenience-store chain are expected to deliver nearly 1.7 million signed petitions to Capitol Hill. Armed with the results of a consumer survey, executives with the …

Most payments startups focusing on mobile commerce these days are relying on either direct debit or carrier billing to handle funds transfers. But Billing Revolution, a 2-year-old Seattle-based company, is marketing a system that lets consumers buy products on their handsets with a single click, and charge their transactions to …

The year 2012 could mark a milestone for the prepaid card industry. That's when load volume on so-called open-loop, or general-purpose, prepaid cards could surpass load volume on closed-loop cards, if predictions by Mercator Advisory Group Inc. prove true. Maynard, Mass.-based Mercator recently released several prepaid market reports, the latest …

In the wake of a patent award announced this week, a top Tyfone Inc. executive says the company expects to have what it calls a “scalable” platform built by the middle of next year for a contactless mobile-payments system based on Secure Digital memory cards that fit into handsets. “The …

Having lost one brawl with Congress this year over credit cards, big banks apparently are in no mood to fight about another increasingly political issue, overdraft fees. Leading debit card issuers Bank of America Corp. on Tuesday and JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Wednesday announced major changes to their overdraft-fee …

A new data-security service announced on Tuesday by heavyweight players in payment processing and data security?First Data Corp. and EMC Corp.'s RSA unit, known as The Security Division of EMC?is expected to boost a technology called tokenization, the replacement of cardholder account numbers with surrogate numbers or “tokens.” Since the …