MasterCard Inc. plans to pay off its remaining $400 million settlement obligation to retailers over debit card acceptance early for a discounted $335 million, according to a filing the card network made on Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Attorneys for the retailer plaintiffs have signed on to the …

A move by United Air Lines Inc. to shift to certain travel agents the costs and other responsibilities for ticket sales on credit cards has the industry in an uproar and has prompted a leading trade association to file a letter with the U.S. Department of Justice asking the agency …

Despite tests and innumerable press releases, the number of payment transactions from cell phones barely registers. But payments from mobile devices are about to take off thanks to a convergence of factors on the demand and supply side, according to a new report from Yankee Group Research Inc. The “Dialing …

Bank of America Corp. and processor First Data Corp. launched a merchant-acquiring joint venture Monday, a move that marks the third major change in BofA's acquiring business in five years. First Data will own 48.5% of the new Atlanta-based Banc of America Merchant Services LLC. BofA will own 46.5%, and …

So-called third-party checks represent a potentially lucrative niche market for remote deposit capture, and now a biometric-authentication vendor has been granted a patent for a process by which such checks can be authorized and imaged for deposit under Check 21 rules. AllTrust Networks, which announced the patent last week, now …

PIN-debit cards and contactless acceptance seem like two unlikely electronic-payment services to promote in one point-of-sale device, but that's exactly what First Data Corp. is doing with the latest addition to its FD line of POS hardware. The big processor's goal with the new FD-30 PIN pad: build future demand …

MasterCard Inc. on Wednesday announced its person-to-person payment service for mobile phones has launched in the U.S. with one issuer on board and an untold number waiting in the wings. The card network's Mobile MasterCard MoneySend service, which has been in the works for at least a year (Digital Transactions …

A new service debuted on Monday in Canada for which there is no equivalent in the U.S.: a single mobile person-to-person payments offering from the nation's three major wireless telecommunications companies. The service, called Zoompass, also is linked to a prepaid MasterCard PayPass contactless card that gives it utility at …

U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin's introduction this week of a Senate companion to U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr.'s Credit Card Fair Fee Act of 2009, along with a little-noticed bill introduced last month in the House, bring to three the number of interchange bills pending in the Democrat-controlled Congress. And while …

The Credit Card Fair Fee Act, a bill that would inject government into the interchange-setting process, has been resurrected after dying in committee last year. But this time there are more players around the table seemingly less inclined to sympathize with the defenders of the current bank card interchange system. …