American Express Co. deepened its prepaid card relationship with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. with Monday’s announcement that its Serve card will be sold in 4,100 U.S. Walmart-branded stores. The Walmart stores also will become part of Serve’s cash-reload network, boosting its location count to 19,500. Serve’s thus will become the biggest …

Taking a cue from its Bluebird prepaid card for customers of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., American Express Co. today relaunched its Serve prepaid card with new features, more reload locations, and new retailer partners along with no reload fees at 14,000 7-Eleven and CVS/pharmacy locations, and a $1 monthly fee that …

Some of the biggest payments companies and debit card issuers this week reported their latest volumes and related data along with their fourth-quarter financials. • American Express Co. late Thursday reported that U.S. card-billed business grew 7% to $155.5 billion from $145.5 billion in 2011’s last quarter. International volume increased …

Lending took a bit out of travel-and-entertainment card leader American Express Co.'s second-quarter profits, but discount revenue still grew. Meanwhile, Fifth Third Processing Solutions outperformed its struggling parent company, and USA Technologies Inc. reported that transactions on its network of unattended machines more than doubled while sales of contactless card-reading …

After years of looking to make fare payment easier, mass-transit agencies have found the answer in contactless cards. That’s giving consumers a compelling reason to use contactless on a broader scale. Mass adoption of a new technology requires giving consumers a compelling reason to use it on a daily basis. …

A network-sponsored spec for streamlined digital payments rolls toward implementation later this year, promising cleaner checkouts but also stirring questions about how it will work. Remember all the excitement last spring about a so-called common buy button the major card networks were working on (“The Shared Checkout’s Slow Check-in,” June)? …

Adyen N.V. has had a busy year, and on Tuesday it made yet another significant move by announcing it is now doing business in Canada. The Dutch payments company, which already operates in the United States and Latin America as well as Europe and Asia, also announced four brands as …

Visa Inc. is joining the other three card brands in making signatures optional for many of its transactions beginning in April. The card brand, which had credit card volume of $499 billion and debit volume of $388 billion in its fourth quarter ended Sept. 30, says in a blog post published …

• TouchSuite, a merchant-services company operated by American Bankcard LLC, announced it purchased Merchant Bankcard Systems of America, which has approximately 1,000 merchants in its portfolio. Terms of the deal, which closed Feb. 7, were not disclosed. • Middleware provider Datacap Systems Inc. said it completed level 3 EMV certification with …

Merchant processor First American Payment Systems L.P. on Thursday reported that it bought the independent sales organization portfolio of Chase Commerce Solutions, the merchant-acquiring and payment-processing unit of banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. Neither company would disclose the purchase price or the number of ISOs and merchants involved in the …