Competitive Strategies

Credit cards began staging a somewhat wobbly post-recession recovery in 2010 and 2011. But new figures from First Data Corp. and Visa Inc. indicate credit card charge volume is back to just about full health. In a mid-March investor presentation, Visa reported that U.S. credit card payment volume increased 11% …

  Dogged by seemingly unrelenting bad news that now includes possible violations of U.S. sanctions against Iran, leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. late Monday said its long-time chief executive officer Douglas G. Bergeron “is stepping down,” effective today. The company named its chairman, Richard McGinn, as interim chief …

Mike Duffy, president and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Paymentech merchant-acquiring subsidiary and one of the acquiring industry’s most prominent figures, died Thursday after a long illness. “It is difficult to put into words how much Mike will be missed,” said Gordon Smith, chief executive of Chase …

Using a three-pronged technology play that includes enabling consumers to share merchant offers through social media, Boston-based SCVNGR Inc.’s mobile-payments unit LevelUp has added 500,000 new consumer users in just the past four months, bringing its total user base to 1 million. The strategy is part of a larger plan …

  Heads look like they’re going to roll at troubled point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. as it begins what chief executive Douglas Bergeron calls a “rebuilding year” in the wake of missteps that contributed to lower-than-expected revenues. Bergeron told stock analysts Tuesday that the company has initiated “an exhaustive …

Could the new Chase Merchant Services (CMS) processing entity announced Feb. 26 by JPMorgan Chase and Co. and Visa Inc. be a harbinger of a major change in the way bank card payments operate? The payments industry is abuzz with talk about how CMS could shake things up by enabling …

Nine months after unveiling its digital-wallet strategy, MasterCard Inc. on Monday announced the start of that strategy’s implementation. Known as MasterPass, the new wallet platform enables mobile payments by consumers using either near-field communication (NFC) technology or quick-response (QR) codes to trigger links between handsets and merchant terminals. Wallets based …

Visa Inc. is teaming up with the hot smart-phone manufacturer Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to kick-start the market for near-field communication (NFC) payments, and it’s also got a deal with technology provider Roam to develop mobile payments. Under an agreement with South Korea-based Samsung that Visa announced Monday, banks and …

No stranger to prepaid cards, payment card processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) will become a major force in the prepaid niche with its planned cash acquisition of program manager NetSpend Holdings Inc. that values NetSpend at $1.4 billion. The deal the two companies announced late Tuesday would pay NetSpend …

New Visa Inc. chief executive Charles W. Scharf used his first earnings conference call with analysts Wednesday to offer an olive branch to U.S. merchants. Scharf’s comments came on the heels of an earnings and operational report for fiscal 2013’s first quarter that show strong U.S. Visa credit card growth …