The parent company of major prepaid card issuer The Bancorp Bank on Wednesday disclosed that the bank had entered into a consent order with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that places restrictions on its dealings with independent sales organizations. The order also prevents the bank in some instances from issuing …

  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 …

Point-of-sale terminal maker and payment-services provider VeriFone Systems Inc. says it will cut its worldwide workforce by 500 full-time-equivalent employees, or about 9%, by year’s end as it continues to streamline operations in a fast-changing payments market. While it will be paying $30 million in severance, the San Jose, Calif.-based …

Arguing that a federal appeals court “disregarded the plain letter of the statute,” a group of merchants and merchant associations is preparing a request to the U.S. Supreme Court to review a case in which it is battling to overturn the Federal Reserve Board’s interpretation of the Durbin Amendment’s debit …

Vantiv-Mercury: Bad News for ISOs? Mercury Payment Systems LLC made its reputation as the leader in a rising niche of independent sales organizations that offer payment processing as part of business-management applications sold to merchants by software developers, dealers, and value-added resellers. In contrast, many ISOs still peddle straight payments …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@BitMint.com In all matters of online payments, cryptography is essentially the only strategic cyberwar weapon in our arsenal. Cryptography is a means to differentiate between those who are in possession of a piece of data, usually referred to as a key, and those who don’t possess the …

Jim Daly Has the U.S. payment card industry invited federal regulation by taking so long to replace the magnetic stripe? The massive data breach at Target Corp. as well as other cyber thefts at national retailers disclosed over the past six months have raised the unwelcome possibility among merchant acquirers, …

Near-field communication for payments has floundered for years. Now, host card emulation promises to revive it by cutting out the mobile carrier. By John Stewart If zoologists studied payments critters, they would be astounded at the gestation period of near-field communication. Here is a powerful technology that has languished in …

Dwolla Inc. is in the next-day transfer business now. The alternative-payment network announced Thursday it is offering the service for withdrawals from Dwolla accounts to its users’ bank accounts. Relying on the automated clearing house system, the transfer service is an opportunity to use an existing network while Dwolla continues …

By Jim Daly In what’s shaping up to be a very busy year in the vibrant world of electronic bill payments, financial-management software provider Intuit Inc. on Tuesday announced plans to buy online and mobile bill-pay services provider Check Inc. for $360 million. Rumored for about a month, the deal …