Visa Inc. in October will double the current $25 purchase limit in its Visa Easy Payment Service to $50 under which no signature or PIN entry will be required for credit and debit card transactions at grocery and discount stores. The network also is changing some chargeback procedures that it says will …

MasterCard Inc. on Wednesday posted continued strong growth in debit cards during the first quarter, including in fee revenue. The No. 2 U.S. card network also took issue with the findings of a Federal Reserve report released on Tuesday showing interchange for regulated card issuers has plunged since the Durbin …

Quick—which of these five common financial products was the only one to grow last year: credit cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, checking accounts, or personal savings accounts? If you answered “prepaid cards,” give yourself a gold star. New research from Javelin Strategy & Research says fewer consumers in 2011 reported …

Peter Lucas The creature of the nation’s biggest wireless carriers dumped its payments-network strategy a year ago, and now things are looking up for its mobile wallet. The key difference: an emphasis on offers and rewards. It won’t be long before the eyes of the payment industry focus on Salt …

Lauri Giesen As EFT networks hunt for new business in the era of the Durbin Amendment, MoneyPass is expanding beyond its comfortable ATM space to link banks to point-of-sale PIN-debit services. Most of the headlines in the general press about the Durbin Amendment in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform law focused …

Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments You’ll need a fair amount of memory on your hard drive to keep track of all the comings and goings in the bubbling world of alternative payments. By now, our Field Guide to Alternative Payments needs no introduction. It’s one of our most popular …

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday released data about banks’ debit card interchange income now that the Durbin Amendment is in effect. Not surprisingly, the numbers show that interchange for regulated card issuers plunged. The nation’s leading retailer trade group took the occasion to decry the Fed, even though merchants …

A little-noticed new Georgia law creates a new type of bank dedicated solely to merchant acquiring that could radically transform how the acquiring business works in the U.S. Enacted at the behest of Global Payments Inc., the big Atlanta-based merchant processor, the law enables a non-bank acquirer to own its …

In the wake of the Durbin Amendment’s debit card price controls taking effect last fall and other new regulations, the payments industry is feeling politically battered and bruised and fearing that more fights with merchants are on the way. “Our era of self-regulation of pricing has ended,” Mary Weaver Bennett, …

Google Inc. on Monday thrust itself into the prepaid processing business with its acquisition of TxVia Inc., a 5-year-old processor based in New York City. The deal, which apparently closed immediately on undisclosed terms, allows Google to take over technology and network connections that could prove useful as it struggles …