Credit Cards

Consumers used smart phones or tablets to spend $962 million on holiday purchases across three key shopping days in the past week, further cementing the importance of these devices to retailers. n Adobe says 18.3% of online sales came from mobile devices on Cyber Monday, an 80% increase from last …

The recent announcement that U.S. Bancorp would issue American Express-branded credit cards brings yet another big domestic bank into American Express Co.’s network of third-party issuers under a strategy AmEx uses to build transaction volume. AmEx had 77 so-called Network Card License (NCL) arrangements with banks worldwide at the end …

Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards will come to the U.S., but probably not before the payment card networks postpone current deadlines and offer strong incentives for merchants that might include interchange relief and dumping the signature as a cardholder- verification method, according to a new research report from Celent LLC. Card …

The first major deadline in the transformation of U.S. credit and debit cards from magnetic-stripe tokens to smart cards embedded with a chip is just under two years away. Come October 2015, the liability for fraudulent transactions shifts to merchants that do not support the chip card standard EMV. n …

Mobile devices, which have fundamentally changed so much of the electronic payments business, are now shaking up the cross-border remittance market. Twelve-year-old Xoom Corp., a relative newcomer to the business, says 37% of its transactions in the third quarter originated on mobile devices, compared to 22% a year ago. More …

So far, the passes have chopped an average of 15 seconds off drive-up service times for the close to 600 customers who have registered their devices for the program. “That’s huge for us,” Stephen Baclini, president of Rawson Food Service, which operates six Wendy’s stores on the island, tells Digital …

AnywhereCommerce, a Montreal-based engineering firm, has released an updated version of its Nomad wireless chip-card reader that is smaller and less expensive than the inaugural version of the device, the company announced Tuesday. Nomad 2.0 uses Bluetooth wireless technology to connect with mobile devices operating on Google Inc.’s Android, Apple …

The Coin card, which officially launched last Thursday but is not yet available in the market, is generating a tidal wave of buzz in the press and on social-media sites but is not wowing payments experts contacted by Digital Transactions News. “It’s solving a problem that doesn’t really exist,” says …

With debit card interchange rates already regulated, a majority of respondents to a Digital Transactions News poll consider caps on credit card interchange within five years as very likely. n Though no such legislation is under review at this time, the response suggests few would be surprised should it appear. …

How to improve the U.S. payment system? Figure out a way to make electronic payments faster and more secure, as well as a system that would connect various closed-loop payment networks with hundreds of millions accounts. And reduce regulation, too. Those were some of the ideas bandied about Thursday at …