Marketing

Underbanked and unbanked consumers who use check-cashing stores rely heavily on traditional payment forms such as checks, cash, and money orders for bill payments and few use electronic payment methods, according to new survey data from Aite Group LLC. While that may not be a surprise, Aite's study shows the …

VeriFone Holdings Inc.'s PAYware Mobile mobile-payments initiative includes not just the previously announced card swipe for Apple Inc.'s iPhone and an iPhone app, but also a marketing campaign that aims to make the payment terminal maker's brand name more familiar with consumers, especially consumers that run small businesses. San Jose, …

With merchant acquirers on the lookout for new ways to manage and motivate sales agents in a difficult economy, processor United Bank Card has launched a program for independent sales organizations that furnishes qualified merchant leads and also sets up appointments with those merchants. The new program specifically supports an …

A comparison-shopping application that works on mobile phones will soon tie into PayPal Inc.'s payment platform, blurring the distinction between online commerce and brick-and-mortar retailing and setting the stage for potentially big transaction volumes. Alexander Muse, co-founder of Dallas-based Big in Japan Inc., says he expects his company's ShopSavvy app …

More evidence that the online bill-payment market isn't exactly a slam-dunk for banks emerged Monday when Aite Group LLC issued a report saying that while adoption of online bill-pay is still growing, the rate of increase is slowing. Bill-pay vendors need to get serious about innovations if they want to …

While a number of technology companies have recently introduced products allowing mobile merchants to accept card payments on their handsets, a startup is demonstrating the first application that would let merchants take contactless payments on a wide variety of mobile phones. Indeed, Zenius Solutions Inc. hopes its software, called ZeniusMobilePOS, …

The announcement on Wednesday by Nokia, the world's largest cell-phone maker, that it will launch a mobile-payments service is likely to give a competitive leg-up to Obopay Inc., the Redwood City, Calif.-based mobile-payments processor that developed the software for the new venture, called Nokia Money. Four-year-old Obopay, in which Nokia …

A company founded by the man behind Capital One Financial Corp.'s decoupled debit program is introducing what it terms a “next-generation debit rewards” system that allows banks to provide cost-free rewards to cardholders. Under the system developed by Atlanta-based Cardlytics, merchants fund rewards that will be offered to banks' online-banking …

The U.S. Treasury Department's Direct Express card for Social Security recipients apparently is the right prepaid card at the right time. Treasury's Financial Management Service last week reported that more than 500,000 Americans use the Comerica Bank-issued card, which is aimed at getting Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) …

More than 2 million new households logged into online banking over the past year, bringing the online-banking share of the nation's households with Internet access to 79%. That's one of the key findings from the 2009 Consumer Billing and Payment Trends survey from bank processor and bill-pay technology provider Fiserv …