Purveyors of card-acceptance services for mobile phones  are booking merchants by the hundreds of thousands.  But many of these merchants present underwriting risks and generate little charge volume. Are they worth it?   By Jim Daly   Everyman a merchant? Thanks to smart phones and aggressive merchant processors such …

  Linda Punch   A product of its acquired Revolution Money program, Serve is American Express Co.’s entrant into the increasingly competitive mobile, online, and person-to-person payments market. Will it deliver?   When an industry heavyweight like American Express Co. throws its hat into the digital-payments ring, people sit up …

  n Intuit announced late on Monday that it had acquired the mobile Web platform developed by San Mateo, Calif.-based MMV, a joint venture formed in 2008 by Citigroup Inc. and SK Telecom, a major South Korean telecommunications company, to offer mobile-banking capability worldwide. Intuit, which had been licensing the …

With final debit card regulations at hand that will end exclusive partnerships between payment networks and debit card issuers, the head of Discover Financial Services says his company has added capacity to its Pulse electronic funds transfer network to handle anticipated new business. n Nelms was responding to a question …

  n Dennes, who joined Huntington in September after helping to launch a popular mobile-capture application at USAA Federal Savings Bank, says the bank has “interest” in a point-of-sale payments capability, likely based on near-field communication (NFC) chips. Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., Google Inc., and a carrier-led joint venture called …

  Visa Inc. on Thursday cemented into place two more pieces of a developing strategy for what is rapidly turning into a hotly competitive market for mobile payments. The world’s largest card network announced it had struck an agreement with Monitise PLC, a U.K.-based provider of mobile services for financial …

Defenders of the debit card interchange status quo saw their last, best hope to delay draconian Federal Reserve regulations from taking effect go down to defeat Wednesday afternoon. An amendment in the U.S. Senate that would have delayed the Fed’s rules died on a 54-45 vote, six shy of the …

  All Signs Point to Credit Cards’ Recovery   After getting KO’d in the recession, credit card usage is back on its feet. While card issuers are more cautious than they were a few years ago, consumers who have credit cards are using them more frequently, and they are spending …

Probably no pathway in electronic payments is more littered with the wreckage of failed processors than that of micropayments. But recent moves by publishers to charge for content is helping fuel renewed interest in the business of processing tiny transactions. Google Inc., for example, has developed a micropayments engine to help …

  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 …