Credit Cards

Visa USA reported Thursday an increasing willingness among consumers to use cards for purchases valued at under $25, a highly coveted transaction segment in which the San Francisco-based bank card network waives its signature requirement in some 17 merchant categories. The network says its payment volume in this segment jumped …

Newly private iPayment Inc. this week reported a 12% increase in operating profits despite single-digit growth in charge volume. Nonetheless, the big Nashville, Tenn.-based independent sales organization posted a net loss of $5.81 million on expenses related to its May 10 management-led buyout, compared with net income of $7.73 million …

More and more consumers now expect their last-minute bill payments to be credited to their accounts with near instantaneous effect. And, increasingly, billers and processors are meeting that expectation?or at least laying plans to. “The trend is toward real-time [bill payment],” says Dave Fortney, senior vice president for electronic presentment …

MasterCard Inc., reporting quarterly results for the first time since its initial public offering in May, said it lost $310.5 million in the three-month period ended June 30, compared to a gain of $120.2 million in the second quarter of 2005. One-time expenses, including a $400.3 million cost for 13.5 …

American Express Co. cardholders paid their AmEx bills nearly 100 million times in 2005 using the Internet, Judson C. Linville, president of the New York City-based firm's U.S. Consumer Card Services Group, told analysts Wednesday. “The Web has fundamentally transformed our business in the last few years,” Linville said at …

Brick-and-mortar merchants?and restaurants in particular?pose the biggest risk when it comes to card-data compromises, while point-of-sale systems based on personal computers as well as those hooked up to broadband connections are at significantly greater risk. That's according to new data released by AmbironTrustWave, a Chicago-based company that performs security audits …

First Data Corp. announced Tuesday that it would process the merchant portfolio affiliated with Puerto Rico-based banking company Popular Inc.'s Banco Popular North America unit. The portfolio provides card-processing services for an undisclosed number of BPNA's 50,000 small-business customers in the United States. Banco Popular had outsourced the file to …

Growth in transaction volume slowed at online payment processor PayPal Inc. in the second quarter, with total transactions for the period reaching 143.3 million, up 27% from the year-ago quarter, according to data released last week by eBay Inc., PayPal's San Jose, Calif.-based parent company. That compares with year-over-year growth …

Large merchants whose card transactions are chiefly derived from physical stores, rather than the Internet, will now face stricter requirements for proving compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, according to an expert observer. With Visa USA this week introducing a revision of the volume bands by which it …

The simmering battle over card interchange, which up to now has been fought mostly in the courts, found a new battlefield in the U.S. Senate Wednesday as opponents and supporters of the controversial fee testified before that body's Judiciary Committee. The occasion was a hearing dubbed, “Credit Card Interchange Rates: …