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 …

Target Corp. on Friday said personal data on 70 million customers were compromised in a separate theft during the same data breach it disclosed last month that exposed up to 40 million credit and debit card accounts of U.S. shoppers. That could bring the total number of customers affected up …

For Retailers, An Unsettling Settlement Retailers and their trade groups opposed to a $5.7 billion settlement of a class-action antitrust case challenging credit card interchange are not going gentle into that good night now that U.S. District Judge John Gleeson has approved the controversial deal. Defendants in the 8-year-old litigation, …

A new point-of-sale card-acceptance app expected to be available in early 2014 will use pattern-recognition technology to capture a payment card number, potentially speeding up an in-store transaction and eliminating the need for a card reader. n Cartwheel Register eschews a card reader that plugs into the audio jack in …

Prepaid and gift card provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. is further broadening its reach beyond supermarket gift card malls with its deal to offer gift card services within PayPal Inc.’s digital wallet and its pending acquisition of InteliSpend Prepaid Solutions, which offers corporate incentives and consumer promotion products. Announced Wednesday, …

Ammo for ISOs in the Tablet Wars Independent sales organizations are starting to feel squeezed by technology companies selling tablet-based point-of-sale solutions to merchants, according to terminal kingpin VeriFone Systems Inc. So VeriFone last month rolled out a tablet-based platform for its resellers that they can price and market to …

JPMorgan Chase & Co., which this spring stopped selling Visa gift cards through its network of branches, has now quit the business entirely. The decision comes weeks ahead of the biggest selling season of the year for gift cards but doesn’t surprise some observers, who point to the challenges recent …

In a sign of the increasing significance of mobile commerce in the U.S. economy, comScore Inc. reported on Tuesday that remote m-commerce sales totaled $10.6 billion in the first half of the year, or about 10% of total online volume, including desktop e-commerce. ComScore forecasts that online spending on mobile …

Karen Epper Hoffman PINless debit card transactions are gaining favor as online merchants latch onto this speedy payment alternative. But will PINless debit’s rise give debit networks much of a boost in the short term? Call it PINless debit version 2.0. The ability to make a payment with a debit …

The slow death of paper checks showed up again in the latest quarterly statistics from NACHA, the regulatory body for the automated clearing house network. The ACH, which links virtually every financial institution in the country, allows banks and merchants to convert checks into electronic formats. But transaction volume on …