Merchant groups on Monday sought to assure Congress that they won't reject small debit card issuers' cards once the so-called Durbin Amendment makes large issuers' debit cards much cheaper to accept. “If merchants didn't accept the card, they would risk losing the sale and losing the customer; a risk very …

  Components Trae Cassell   The disastrous Kardashian Kard notwithstanding, it’s possible to market a successful prepaid card for teens. The key is a proper understanding of functionality, image, and fees.   The number of companies hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the teen prepaid debit card market is …

  Security Peter Lucas While it’s effective against malware like the pesky Zeus Trojan, banks have been slow to adopt out-of-band authentication. Now, with mobile and P2P applications growing, that may soon change. Imagine the following scenario: A cybercrook plants a malware Trojan, infamously known as Zeus, in the Web …

  Components Jane Adler The 40-year-old automated teller machine is hardly thought of as a springboard for innovation. Yet new technology is giving rise to a raft of services that promise to bring renewed purpose to the humble bank machine.   Now 40 years old, the ATM would seem to …

  Cover Story Mobile-payment schemes proliferate but innovations abound in all corners of the new world of electronic-payment systems competing for consumer and merchant adoption.   By John Stewart, Jim Daly, and Linda Punch       We’re putting on weight. First published in 2009, Digital Transactions’ Field Guide to …

  Networks   Linda Punch In 2006, the No. 2  card network went public, untethering itself from decades of bank ownership. Has it worked?   What a difference an IPO can make. In the five years since it offered its stock to the public, MasterCard Inc., the world’s second-largest card …

  Endpoint A few smaller banks get it, and have issued EMV cards to their customers who travel abroad. But most bigger banks are still on the sidelines. We’re still stuck with the mag stripe and all of its attendant problems because the big banks have too great a stake …

Could a little-noted provision in the Durbin Amendment strangle the nascent U.S. contactless-payments market in its crib? It’s a very real possibility, says a pair of researchers, and the consequences could deal a blow to the prospects for mobile payments that depend on a promising technology called near-field communication (NFC). …

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 …

Once avoided as a money-loser, person-to-person payments are picking up momentum, with Discover Financial Services as the latest entrant. Discover’s Money Messenger service, which went live Monday, allows cardholders to send cash to anyone with a PayPal account. Recipients who aren’t PayPal customers can set up an account quickly via …