Credit Cards

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Visa Inc. stunned the payments industry late Monday with an announcement that its chief executive, Charles Scharf, has resigned, effective Dec. 1. Scharf will be replaced by Alfred F. Kelly, a 23-year veteran of American Express Co. and currently a Visa board member. Kelly, whose service …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews While the payments business is caught up these days in working out strategies for mobile apps and social media, it turns out these aren’t the cutting-edge technologies they once were. Instead, fields like virtual reality, machine learning, and natural language are winning the spotlight. That’s according …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Its first full quarter of ownership of the big Costco Wholesale Corp. cobranded credit card portfolio helped to boost Citigroup Inc.’s North American purchase volume by 57%, the giant New York City-based bank reported Friday.

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Ripple effects from the Wendy’s Co. data breach continue to swirl around the Columbus, Ohio-based hamburger chain, some perhaps in unexpected ways. A Michigan credit union that last week began declining credit and debit card transactions by its members at all Wendy’s locations refuses to say …

With malware and hacker attacks on payment card-accepting devices increasing in sophistication, the PCI Security Standards Council last month announced updated rules for protecting such devices. “The updates are designed to stay one step ahead of criminals who continue to develop new ways to steal credit and debit card data …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews If they could assign a letter grade to the first year of EMV chip card payments in the U.S., half of Digital Transactions News readers would give it an “F,” according to results of the daily e-newsletter’s weekly poll. The newsletter’s Sept. 23 edition asked respondents to …

• The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to a New York state law barring retailers from imposing credit card surcharges, Reuters reported. A federal appellate court upheld the law a year ago; nine other states have similar laws. • Online business lender Merchant Advance Capital said it …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Payments networks face a competitive landscape marked by rapid innovation, so the two biggest systems, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., are responding by increasing the access developers have to their once tightly guarded skunk works. The latest move comes Wednesday from MasterCard, which announced MasterCard Developers. …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews A federal appeals court on Monday handed American Express Co. a signal victory in the age-old battle with merchants over card-acceptance costs, but in doing so it may also have bolstered the card giant in its efforts to set and enforce merchant pricing. The U.S. Court …

By Kevin Woodward @DTPaymentNews Almost a year after the U.S. payment card industry adopted EMV chip cards for point-of-sale transactions, approximately 44% of U.S. merchants that accept credit and debit cards have EMV POS terminals. That assessment, in The Strawhecker Group’s latest EMV survey released Tuesday, is less than an …