Issuing/Originating

Target Corp. is making good on its plans to accelerate chip-and-PIN payment card technology in its stores and among its customers with Monday’s announcement that it will move its entire Redcard credit and debit card portfolio to cards that use MasterCard Inc.’s chip-and-PIN technology. Most of Target’s cards, however, will …

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 …

In a further escalation of its war on costly bill-payment exceptions, automated clearing house governing body NACHA on Monday announced a new program that will convert erroneous electronic bill payments that otherwise would go through as paper checks into ACH transactions with a new field where the biller can enter …

A recent study by First Annapolis Consulting Inc. found that 22 of the nation’s 30 largest debit card issuers are actively replacing cards in the wake of retailer Target Corp.’s massive data breach. Meanwhile, a suburban Chicago bank warned customers not to use their debit cards in Chicago taxicabs and …

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 …

  Google Inc. today announced the availability of a payment card to accompany its Google Wallet online and smart phone-based service. The card, which is funded by money held in a consumer’s Google Wallet account, can be used at point-of-sale locations that accept MasterCard Inc. transactions. MasterCard was part of …

In an effort to reduce the volume of returned transactions and motivate banks to crack down on originators of incorrect or risky automated clearing house payments, ACH network governing body NACHA today proposed two new rules to improve transaction quality. One would set new fines that the network could assess …

A federal indictment announced on Thursday against four Russians and a Ukrainian man casts new light on some of the biggest breaches of payment card data in recent years. The defendants, affiliated with notorious computer hacker Albert Gonzalez, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence but named as one of …

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and EMV won’t be fully implemented in the United States for some time to come, but at least some foreign observers who have experienced nationwide deployment of the Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card standard are starting to show impatience with EMV’s sluggish U.S. progress. Fearing a …

The Durbin Amendment’s pricing caps are having an impact on small issuers as well as large, and issuers overall are far from bullish about debit-transaction growth, according to a wide-ranging report released on Wednesday. Issuers exempt from the law’s interchange cap report an average income of 45 cents per transaction …