Competitive Strategies

Visa Inc. will quintuple the size of its Visa ReadyLink prepaid card reload network when the big money-transfer firm MoneyGram International Inc. enables its 40,000 U.S. locations to add funds to prepaid cards under a deal Visa announced Tuesday. The MoneyGram locations will make Visa's reload network nearly as big …

American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services both report that enlisting bank card acquirers to grow their merchant networks is paying off. Until their initiatives started, merchants had to deal with separate customer-service staff and received separate statements for their respective AmEx or Discover accounts. That made taking brands more …

The Retail Gift Card Association is recruiting new members with the aim of building a positive image of closed-loop gift cards, getting members to follow an ethics code, and countering the bad publicity directed at gift cards in recent months by consumer groups and legislators monitoring marooned cards whose sponsor …

The Accel/Exchange electronic funds transfer network has signed up a handful of issuers for an Internet-based PIN debit pilot that processed its first transaction, for $9.49, on Wednesday, according to Michael Kelly, general manager of the Morris Plains, N.J.-based network, a unit of Milwaukee-based bank processor Fiserv Inc. Kelly says …

The U.S. alternative-payments market has already attracted a slew of startups over the past few years, and now it's drawing even more competition from overseas. Paymate Global Inc., the U.S. arm of Australian processor Paymate Pty Ltd., earlier this month completed its integration with eBay Inc.'s checkout system and joins …

Key operating metrics posted solid gains in recent quarterly reports from two of the payment industry's specialty providers, non-bank ATM network operator Cardtronics Inc. and expedited bill-payment provider TIO Networks Corp. Houston-based Cardtronics, however, still posted a $57.9 million fourth-quarter loss, most of which originated with a one-time charge involving …

Viewpointe Archive Services LLC this week introduced two products that, the company says, respond to rising volumes of imaged checks and could smooth the way for more financial institutions to participate in end-to-end image exchange. One of the products catches mismatches between check images and the data contained in associated …

Nearly two years after introducing a same-day bill-payment service, Metavante Corp. reported on Tuesday its client financial institutions are seeing a 10% adoption rate among active online bill payers on average after 19 months of offering the product. The average rate after nine months is approximately 5%, the Milwaukee-based banking …

In a move that may indicate a thawing of relations between mobile operators on the one hand and banks and card networks on the other, Visa Inc. announced on Wednesday it will work with the London-based GSM Association to develop standards for mobile payments and handset-based money transfers. The first …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Wednesday slashed the pricing it imposes on its prepaid Visa card, cutting the activation fee by nearly two-thirds, the reload fee by 35%, and the monthly maintenance charge by 39%. Since it rolled out its MoneyCard in June 2007, Wal-Mart has sold 2 million of the …