Credit Cards

It’s back-to-school time, and that means it’s also time for college-age students and their parents to pay tuition charges. Most of the largest private, public, and community colleges accept credit cards for these charges, but a growing majority of these institutions also assess hefty so-called convenience fees to cardholders, according …

A streamlined approval for contactless mobile-payment devices announced Wednesday by chip card standards body EMVCo could help mobile-payments boosters realize their elusive dream that the coming of chip cards to the U.S. also will lift smart-phone-based payments. The new approval process is meant to confirm that mobile devices enabled for …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews HEI Hotels & Resorts disclosed Friday that malware on point-of-sale systems may have captured payment card information at restaurants and other locations within 20 of its properties. At the same time, the payments industry is watching for clues about the extent of a compromise at Oracle Corp.’s …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews The debate over the price merchants pay to accept credit cards may be about to intensify. A new report suggests that capping credit card interchange at 22 cents plus 30.5 basis points per transaction could cut $15 billion from the current total of $33 billion U.S. merchants …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Visa Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. say there is no news in their standoff that began July 18 with Wal-Mart kicking Visa out of its three stores in Thunder Bay, Ontario. But Visa over the past several weeks has run a marketing campaign to remind residents of …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews A relatively new program geared at shoring up data security at small merchants is making progress toward a crucial January deadline, but not without some full-throated grumbling, if comments and questions at an industry trade show this week in Grapevine, Texas, were any indication. The program, …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Criminals stepped up their attacks on e-commerce sites in the second quarter, producing more than 69 million rejected transactions, a stunning 90% increase from the same quarter a year ago, according to the Q2 2016 Cybercrime report recently released by ThreatMetrix. Of these transactions, 23% were payments, …

It might be a cliché, but the saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same has some validity for merchant acquirers despite the rapid introduction of new technologies and the entrance of new competitors in recent years. For example, the top 10 U.S. merchant acquirers in …

Visa Inc.’s disdain for the automated clearing house as a competing payments network has been a given for years, but never did it come into focus more than it did last week when the giant card network announced its wide-ranging agreement with PayPal Holdings Inc. The deal smoothed over a …

Visa Inc.’s combined U.S. credit and debit card purchase volume grew nearly 10% in the quarter ending June 30, but the payment network’s net income plunged 76% mainly because of its costs to acquire Visa Europe. PayPal Holdings Inc., meanwhile, saw its volumes and bottom line increase in the second …