By Jim Daly JPMorgan Chase & Co. reported Tuesday that 60,000 merchants use its in-house ChaseNet merchant-processing venture and as of January they were generating annualized charge volume of $16 billion. Merchants in the venture include United Airlines, the Marriott hotel chain, DirecTV, 1-800 Flowers, Groupon, Zillow, and Barnes & …

By Jim Daly The U.S. Department of Justice and a merchant group focused on payment card acceptance costs Thursday afternoon hailed a federal district judge’s ruling striking down American Express Co.’s rules banning its merchants from steering AmEx cardholders to lower-cost forms of payment. Earlier in the day, New York …

The PCI Security Standards Council issued a bulletin Friday saying that no version of the Secure Socket Layers (SSL) protocol for protecting Internet communications meets its definition of strong cryptography. Accordingly, the Council said it will soon revise versions 3.0 of its main Payment Card Security data-security standard and the …

American Express Co. on Thursday disclosed that it will not renew its merchant-acceptance and cobranded credit card agreements with Costco Wholesale Corp. The card accounted for about $82 billion of AmEx’s worldwide charge volume last year. The possible loss of the warehouse club’s 16-year AmEx card program had been rumored …

More than 90% of Americans still prefer to receive paper bills, but a strong majority of them pay electronically, according to findings released Monday from a survey sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General. The three-month study of customer records from a major East Coast utility …

By Jim Daly In the opinion of Visa Inc.’s lawyers, the Pulse PIN-debit network’s antitrust suit against the leading payment card network shouldn’t even have a pulse because Pulse hasn’t shown it has been harmed. Meanwhile, Google Inc. and a number of merchants that individually sued Visa and MasterCard Inc. …

Sixty-one percent of respondents to a recent ATM Industry Association survey said that 76% to 100% of the ATMs they operate will be ready for the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card liability shift that takes effect in October 2016, the trade group of ATM independent sales organizations and retail ATM operators …

CoinTerra Inc., an Austin, Texas-based Bitcoin mining and services company, filed for Chapter 7 liquidation late last month, just weeks after one of its key vendors filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against CoinTerra seeking $5.4 million. CoinTerra’s bankruptcy petition filed Jan. 24 estimates the company’s creditors range in number from 222 …

Boosted by higher transaction volumes both in the United States and abroad, MasterCard Inc. on Friday reported a 21% increase, adjusted for foreign-currency effects, in net income for 2014’s fourth quarter. The No. 2 payment network posted an $801 million profit versus $684 million a year earlier on net revenues …

Apple Inc. chief executive Tim Cook said Tuesday afternoon that Apple’s new Apple Pay mobile-payment service is doing well three months after its launch, but he gave few details during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call. “Apple Pay is off to a very strong start,” Cook said in his opening …