Credit Cards

The announcements last week that two top-10 U.S. banks will soon start issuing smart cards based on the EMV chip card standard, while largely symbolic for now, could herald bigger deployments later on. Normal banking competition, meanwhile, could also bring more U.S. banks to issue chip cards, bank executives and …

There may be some good news for large banks and card networks fretting over the looming effective date for the Durbin Amendment and its restrictions on debit card income. While the amendment, part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation signed into law last summer, will severely compress debit card …

Supposedly mature North America lately is sporting growth rates befitting a green-field market for leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. VeriFone, which is moving ahead with plans to buy rival Hypercom Corp., late Tuesday reported that North American revenues increased 43% in its first fiscal 2011 quarter ended Jan. …

The Electronic Transactions Association on Thursday released what it called “guiding principles” that would govern how payment card networks communicate with and implement operational changes that affect merchant acquirers. The guidelines ask the networks to release changes to interchange schedules and operational rules just twice a year and give processors …

The bane of payment cards and to a lesser extent demand-deposit accounts, identity fraud took less of a toll by some measures in 2010 than it has in the seven preceding years, according to new findings from Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin’s annual study found that 3.5% of U.S. adults …

ProPay Inc. this week announced a mobile-payments product that lets consumers communicate with as well as pay merchants from a smart phone whether they are in the store or just nearby. The application, which ProPay calls Zumogo, works with a handful of restaurants in the company’s home state of Utah, …

It’s bad for consumers and bad for the payments industry, but the Durbin Amendment that imminently will upend the U.S. debit card market still presents some opportunities for MasterCard Inc., according to the No. 2 payment network’s president and chief executive, Ajay Banga. Specifically, MasterCard could well pick up new …

With much of the country buried in snow and ice on Wednesday, Visa Inc. released transaction and charge-volume numbers that likely warmed the predilections of electronic-payments watchers. The leading card network reported U.S. credit and debit card payments volume of $493 billion for its first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended …

After about four years of testing, the New York City area’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is beginning the process of building a fare-payment system based on general-purpose contactless cards. MTA officials tell Digital Transactions News that they plan to publish a so-called Concept of Operations, a document outlining the agency’s broad …

Vancouver’s public-transportation authority has selected a $220 million fare-payment system from Cubic Transportation Systems Inc. that includes a transit-only reloadable contactless card but also the ability to accept general-purpose contactless cards. Replacing proprietary fare cards with systems that add transit capabilities to contactless credit and debit cards issued by banks …