New competition from national and regional players is helping to moderate prepaid card pricing for consumers, according to a survey released on Monday by Bankrate.com. Indeed, the majority of the 24 cards studied by the North Palm Beach, Fla.-based information service now carry no fees at all for such …

  Consumers making purchases with the Chicago Transit Authority’s coming Ventra combination transit and general-purpose MasterCard prepaid card are expected to incur maximum user fees of $8.45 in a given month, provided the cardholder triggers all the expected fees in that time period, according to processor First Data Corp. The …

It is the bane of the business press that it is prone to hyperbole. This or that development or trend, worthy of being reported but hardly the Second Coming, is heralded as such in tones of institutional sincerity. Such is the temptation with the news, which broke late in February, …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@BitMint.com Baltimore Green Currency, unlike Bitcoin, is not a challenging currency. It is not competing with the U.S. dollar, but it is rather a dollar tethered to certain restrictions and terms of use. A regular gift card is the same: denominated in U.S. dollars, but effective only …

Lauri Giesen Declining interchange revenues are squeezing non-bank ATM owners and managers, but new revenue sources and technology could ease the pain. It’s a challenging time for many deployers of ATMs in off-premise locations. With higher costs caused by changing government and network regulations and declining interchange revenue, many independent …

Often regarded as operating in a gray area, merchant aggregators let small businesses piggyback on their merchant accounts. But aggregators are moving to the forefront of payments innovation and winning new supporters. By Peter Lucas Complex, confounding, risky, upstart. These are some of the adjectives used to describe merchant aggregators …

Linda Punch Proponents say EMV chip cards with dynamic authentication could take a real bite out of card fraud. But what does this new technology mean for PINs? As the card industry rolls out so-called EMV contact and contactless chip cards in the U.S., the technology known as dynamic data …

Some billers have dismissed virtual cards because they assume the added interchange fees will increase their overall costs. Not true. Billers looking for a way to take payments through a multitude of channels while also controlling costs need look no further than the existing card infrastructure, argues Blair Jeffery. Blair …

  American Express Co.’s announcement that its low-fee Bluebird prepaid card account will be eligible for insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and offer checking account features could be a move to win more business from its upscale core cardholder base as well as provide more services to Bluebird …

  Like metastatic cancer, the cyberattacks originating from ordinary hackers all the way up to national governments seem to be getting worse by the day, according to security experts who spoke Wednesday to a conference of e-commerce executives. Case in point: last week, citizens of South Korea couldn’t use banks …