By Jim Daly An injunction that puts New York State’s ban on merchants’ credit card surcharges on hold could be a prelude to a bigger legal assault on states’ surcharge restrictions. If pro-surcharging merchants prevail, their actions could add some oomph to a provision in the pending settlement of unrelated …

Taking a cue from its Bluebird prepaid card for customers of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., American Express Co. today relaunched its Serve prepaid card with new features, more reload locations, and new retailer partners along with no reload fees at 14,000 7-Eleven and CVS/pharmacy locations, and a $1 monthly fee that …

Durbin Amendment critics have long accused merchants of pocketing the billions they’ve saved since the amendment’s highly controversial debit card interchange price controls took effect two years ago Tuesday. Now, however, retailers are rolling out a study estimating that merchants passed on $5.86 billion in Durbin-related savings to consumers last …

When it comes to payments, the United States might be considered the land of the gap, according to a Federal Reserve assessment issued earlier this month. The assessment is the first of a three-part research study aimed at spurring the modernization of U.S. electronic payments, which many public-sector researchers and …

By Jim Daly In its second major Google Wallet announcement of the week, search-engine giant Google Inc. today said it is bringing the digital wallet for the first time to Apple Inc.’s iPhone, a move that opens the wallet to tens of millions of potential new users. And like Tuesday’s …

Google Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new mobile app for its Google Wallet that emphasizes the wallet’s loyalty and person-to-person payments features that in the past had taken a back seat to its point-of-sale payment capability based on near-field communication (NFC) technology. The app is now available to all smart …

Investors may be disappointed with Apple Inc. in the wake of that tech giant’s introduction of two new iPhone models, but they’re plenty happy with digital wire-transfer company Xoom Corp. San Francisco-based Xoom on Tuesday raised $85.6 million in a new stock offering, about $20 million more than it expected …

  Eight years from their genesis, the lawsuits challenging bank card interchange now collectively known as MDL 1720 are scheduled to reach a milestone Thursday when U.S. District Judge John Gleeson convenes a so-called fairness hearing in his Brooklyn, N.Y., courtroom. The hearing’s purpose is for Gleeson to determine whether …

The Internal Revenue Service is delaying for a year its planned withholding requirement for payment-card-accepting merchants whose names and taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) supplied by their merchant processor do not match the corresponding information the IRS has on file, the Electronic Transactions Association reported to its membership today. The delay …

By Jim Daly The Isis mobile-payments service on Wednesday said five specialty point-of-sale hardware makers would integrate Isis’s SmartTap technology into their products. The companies join a number of major POS terminal makers, including U.S. market leaders VeriFone Systems Inc., Ingenico S.A. and Equinox Payments, already committed to supporting Isis …