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 …
Read More »Americans Overwhelmingly Prefer Paper Bills, but Increasingly Pay Them Electronically
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 …
Read More »Eye on Litigation: Visa Seeks Dismissal of Pulse Lawsuit; Numerous Opt-Out Merchants Settle
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. …
Read More »Most ATM ISOs Moving To Upgrade Their Machines Before 2016 Liability Shift
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 …
Read More »Bitcoin Mining Company CoinTerra Files for Bankruptcy
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 …
Read More »Higher Transaction Volumes Help Boost MasterCard’s Quarterly Profit by 21%
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 …
Read More »Apple CEO Pronounces Apple Pay’s ‘First Inning’ a Success, but Gives Few Details
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 …
Read More »AmEx Claims 400,000 Small Merchants Through Its ISO-Driven OptBlue Program
Some 400,000 small merchants now accept American Express Co. payment cards through the OptBlue program that AmEx announced nearly a year ago. OptBlue enables bank card merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations to offer AmEx acceptance to small businesses and set the pricing through a one-stop-shopping option when they sell …
Read More »A Decentralized Payments System May Work Against a Smooth U.S. EMV Migration
The United States with its several thousand credit and debit card issuers and more than a dozen payment networks presents a stiff challenge to the card industry as it tries to convert from magnetic-stripe stripe cards to Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards, two industry veterans told a group of independent sales …
Read More »U.S. Card Producers Prepare To Crank Out EMV Cards in Big Numbers
By Jim Daly U.S. credit and debit card issuers will be mailing hundreds of millions of Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards to their customers this year and next now that the payment card networks’ EMV liability shift looms just eight months away. Estimates about chip card issuance vary, but all involve …
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