Credit Cards

Quick Chip, a Visa Inc. protocol for streamlining the EMV transaction process, is now available on processor Worldpay’s network. Announced Monday, the service reduces a chip card terminal’s transaction time by approximately 3 seconds, Worldpay says. Quick Chip eliminates the need to leave the card in the reader while waiting …

Data breaches are in the news constantly, but they appear to have no long-term effect on consumers’ use of payment methods. Breaches might, however, spur some consumers to switch hospitals, according to researchers. “Payment attitudes and payment behaviors are very, very sticky,” says Claire Greene, a payments analyst at the …

Unattended tire-inflation and vacuum services for cars long have accepted credit and debit cards as well as cash. Now, one provider, Irving, Texas-based AIR-serv, is taking that a step further by making contactless payments the sole option at more than 6,500 locations throughout Canada. Payments provider MONEXGroup says it is …

The seemingly plodding U.S. migration to the EMV chip card standard may not be so plodding after all. Visa Inc., in data released Friday, says consumers made 1 billion Visa chip card transactions in March, a tripling of the 303.3 million in March 2016. The number of transactions has steadily …

Still smarting from the loss of its big cobranded card and acceptance relationship with Costco Wholesale Corp. last June, American Express Co. managed to beat analysts’ earnings estimates in the first quarter and said it has planted the seeds for future growth. As an example, AmEx said its efforts to …

• Mastercard Inc. said it has completed testing of a biometric-enabled payment card in South Africa. The card contains fingerprint scanning technology. Cardholders enroll their fingerprints at their financial institutions, which are then stored as a digital template on the card. The card can be used in an EMV point-of-sale terminal. Mastercard …

Boosted by the addition of two big U.S. credit card programs and its June 2016 acquisition of Visa Europe, just about every operational metric that matters increased by 20% or more for Visa Inc. in the quarter ending March 31. The major exception was U.S. debit, which grew in only …

Electronic-payments industry efforts to promote card use may be paying off. Significantly more consumers are using credit cards for low-value purchases of $5 or less than they did in 2016. A CreditCards.com survey released Monday found that 17% of consumers typically used their credit cards for these in-store transactions compared …

Consulting firm The Strawhecker Group is out with its 2016 rankings of U.S. merchant acquirers, and they show that 240 acquirers and independent sales organizations processed more than $5 trillion in payment volume. The 10 biggest acquirers accounted for 80% of that volume. Topping the list is JPMorgan Chase & …

The bad news about payments risk just keeps on coming. The Anti-Phishing Working Group Inc. reported last month that phishing attacks reached an all-time high in 2016, totaling 1,220,523. That was up fully 65% over 2015, the group says in its latest quarterly report. Another way to look at the …