The Federal Reserve will leave the current interchange cap on debit card transactions in place, the agency announced this week as part of its biennial review of the regulation formally known as Regulation II, but commonly called the Durbin Amendment. The Fed’s controversial rule implementing the amendment in 2011 imposed …

NetSpend, the prepaid card unit of processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS), is facing a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed Thursday over allegations the company deceptively marketed reloadable debit cards. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, alleges NetSpend promised “immediate access” to …

Consumers may shop in stores more than they do online, but for most—93%—the research into these purchases is taking place online, finds a survey released Tuesday by Revel Systems, an iPad-based point-of-sale system provider. More consumers, 86%, shopping in person at least twice in the month proceeding the July survey …

Visa Inc. announced Thursday that credit and debit card issuers in Europe will be the first issuers to adopt Visa’s program for using 3-D Secure 2.0, the impending update to an authentication protocol for online transactions originally introduced more than a decade ago. Visa said certain rules, such as fraud-chargeback …

Kohl’s Corp. joins the ranks of retailers with their own mobile-wallet services with the launch this week of Kohl’s Pay. Menomonee Falls, Wis.-based Kohl’s said the barcode mobile-payment service exclusively uses the private-label Kohl’s Charge card as the payment mechanism in more than 1,100 Kohl’s stores. To use Kohl’s Pay, …

Apple Pay has brought the one-click simplicity of its mobile-payments service to the desktop and mobile browsers. Apple Inc. on Tuesday released an update for Apple computers that enables consumers to pay using its Apple Pay mobile wallet on participating Web sites, such as Lululemon.com and Apple.com, but only when …

Consumers and merchants can count the seconds it takes to complete an EMV chip card transaction, and now payments provider Cayan LLC has quantified the total cost in hours: 116 million. That is Boston-based Cayan’s estimate of how much more time consumers will spend at the checkout completing EMV transactions …

PayRange Inc., a specialist in contactless payments for vending machines, is making good on $12 million in funding it raised last year with a couple of contract announcements. Portland, Ore.-based PayRange said Monday the Canadian National Vending Alliance, a coalition of large vending operators in Canada, will equip all vending …

Card-brand efforts to improve consumers’ perceptions of EMV transaction speeds took a step ahead this week when a grocer debuted updated EMV software on its point-of-sale systems. New Seasons Markets, including its New Leaf Community Markets unit, is now using the Quick Chip and M/Chip Fast technologies from Visa Inc. …

The $4.3 billion merger of Global Payments Inc. and Heartland Payment Systems Inc. appears to be paying off. Atlanta-based Global Payments released its fiscal fourth-quarter and year-end results Thursday. For the year, which ended May 31, total revenue of $2.9 billion was up 4.5% from $2.8 billion in the prior year. …