American Express Co. is offering new rewards and benefits for using one of its prepaid cards, but at a cost. The card brand and acquirer on Wednesday added a rewards program to its Serve card under the “Serve Cash Back” moniker. Serve Cash Back users, who pay $5.95 per month …

Credit card use, even in merchant categories dominated by debit cards, appears to be growing quicker than debit card use, reports the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in a whitepaper released Monday. The report finds that, from 2007 through 2012, credit cards’ share of payments increased 5% at gas stations …

In less than one grim month, American Express lost two cobranded partnerships and a major court case involving its merchant-acceptance rules. But the 165-year-old payments company is far from finished. As cold as this winter was in most of the country, it was considerably chillier at American Express Co. The …

  Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will be among the first retailers, if not the first, to offer store-branded credit cards with Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chips when its new cards bearing a MasterCard Inc. logo are issued this month. That’s well in advance of an October 2015 deadline from the major card networks …

Prepaid card program managers and issuers are moving beyond their original customer base and ramping up offerings, producing intense competition and falling prices. By Jane Adler Shopped at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. lately? A trip past the checkout lane reveals a robust array of new prepaid card offerings. For example, Wal-Mart’s …

  MasterCard Inc. chief executive Ajay Banga on Wednesday downplayed the company’s controversial digital-wallet fee and said critics had been generating the “wrong noise” about the pending fee. Banga’s comments came during the No. 2 payment card network’s first-quarter conference call with analysts, when Banga also said U.S. consumer spending …

  Consumers making purchases with the Chicago Transit Authority’s coming Ventra combination transit and general-purpose MasterCard prepaid card are expected to incur maximum user fees of $8.45 in a given month, provided the cardholder triggers all the expected fees in that time period, according to processor First Data Corp. The …

Elizabeth Whalen Durbin Amendment rules affecting prepaid card transaction routing take effect next month. Already, the regulations are raising thorny operational, legal, and strategic issues that could take months or more to resolve. It’s not over yet. There is still one more provision from the Durbin Amendment in 2010’s Dodd-Frank …

Lauri Giesen Will PIN debit for online transactions ever take off? Some backers are hopeful for this year, but others argue the Durbin Amendment and alternative technologies—like mobile payments—could make PIN debit irrelevant for e-commerce.Time was, the case for online retailers to accept debit card transactions secured with a PIN …

Spot Credit And Mobile Fuel Online Sales There’s been an awful lot of buzz about mobile payments the past few years, and now the payment method is starting to register. Indeed, 2012 marked the first time mobile-originated transactions accounted for a meaningful share of online purchase volume, says Beth Robertson, …