By Lauri Giesen   Now that the Durbin rates are in place for debit cards, questions are swirling about debit’s growth prospects, the fate of PIN debit and of the small-ticket market, and the implications for prepaid cards.       Imagine a world where banks try to get …

  Discover can point to some major triumphs since it was launched by Sears a quarter-century ago, not least its success in taking on Visa and MasterCard. But a fast-changing payments landscape offers no assurance of future success. Discover’s plan: It pays to network.   By Jim Daly     …

  By Karen Epper Hoffman   Disbursing government benefits via prepaid cards has become an increasingly popular outlet for public agencies seeking operational efficiency and banks hoping to find new avenues to revenue and client retention.       For the beneficiaries of government benefits, “getting carded” is arguably a …

  n Online sales for the year will reach $309 billion, up 16% from $266 billion in 2010, according to the report. That volume will grow to $346 billion next year and $444 billion 2016, the report forecasts. General-purpose credit cards will capture 40% of online spending in 2011 and …

The prepaid card industry is marching to new frontiers as November heads toward a close. Intuit Inc. on Tuesday is expected to launch a prepaid Visa card for new merchants in its GoPayment smart-phone-based service, and the Federal Reserve Board approved prepaid card program manager Green Dot Corp.’s plan to …

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  n As with Chase’s previous two EMV deployments, the new Visa card will allow cardholders to sign for transactions rather than enter a PIN, which is a far more common form of authentication for EMV in markets like Europe and Canada where the smart card technology has been rolled …

The alliance MasterCard Inc. announced earlier this week with Intel Corp. to secure e-commerce transactions will not supersede SecureCode, a MasterCard online authentication system, but will fairly soon lead to a new type of contactless-payment device from an emerging category of ultra-thin, fast-start PCs, executives with both companies tell Digital …

  The Star EFT network, which has been working for several years on ways to enable cardholders to conduct PIN-debit transactions with online merchants, said on Thursday it will offer a service from CardinalCommerce Corp. that promises to allow issuers to choose how to authenticate users of PIN-debit cards in …

Square Inc. on Wednesday introduced an enhancement to its Card Case wallet application that detects when a user is near a participating store and automatically links the user’s phone to the store’s Square account. By relying on this method, which the San Francisco startup calls automatically opening a tab, the …