Smart Cards

As New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority inaugurates contactless payment for fares Friday, major card brands are intensely marketing the tap-and-pay service. Mastercard Inc. announced its Fareback Friday program to reward cardholders for paying for their New York subway rides with a contactless Mastercard product. Consumers may be able to get …

EMV chip cards continued to gain share of U.S. card payments in early 2019, although their conquest is not yet complete more than three years after the payment card networks’ EMV liability shifts. But Visa Inc. says counterfeit fraud is dropping sharply, as intended. Visa reported Thursday that 3.5 million …

Contactless payments account for only an estimated low-single-digit share of U.S. general-purchase credit and debit card transactions, but contactless has a much greater share of payments in Canada and the United Kingdom, recently released data show. Canada’s largest merchant acquirer, Toronto-based Moneris Solutions Corp., says that in the first quarter …

Conventional wisdom in the payments business has been that the advent and spread of contactless cards would pave the way for wider use of mobile payments. But research released this week indicates that may not be the case. Indeed, far from serving as the training wheels for mobile payments, new …

Payments firms continue to strengthen their offerings in the dining sector as evidenced by Wednesday’s announcements from American Express Co., which said it had acquired reservation platform provider Resy Network Inc., and Shift4 Payments, which is launching a pay-at-table system called SkyTab and providing it to new merchants at no …

POSaBIT, a point-of-sale services provider for cannabis retailers, said an analysis of “hundreds of thousands” of transactions at more than 120 California, Washington, and Colorado stores found that consumers belonging to a cannabis retailer’s loyalty rewards program had a 28% higher average ticket value and visited the store more frequently …

Boosted in part by growing card-issuer demand for chip cards that support both contact and contactless payments, card manufacturer CPI Card Group Inc. on Thursday reported a 32% first-quarter increase in sales of U.S. credit and debit cards. Littleton, Colo.-based CPI didn’t specify how much dual-interface cards, which can handle …

Bank of America Corp. is considering not renewing its merchant-acquiring joint venture with First Data Corp., known as Bank of America Merchant Services, when the contract ends in June 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources. BAMS is the nation’s third-largest acquirer, having processed $840 billion in payment …

The conditions for the widespread adoption of contactless payments using chip cards are in place, asserts a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. But when that will happen and what will trigger it are unknown in the Fed report, “Tap to Pay: Will Contactless Cards Pave the …

KeyBank said it has begun issuing contactless-enabled Mastercard credit and debit cards. Diebold Nixdorf Inc. said KeyBank will upgrade its network of 1,400 ATMs with Diebold’s DN Vynamic portfolio of software applications that includes ATM management and more options for customers, including selection of bill denominations. Payments provider CCBill LLC announced …