News

February, 2014

• 27 February

  Mobile Photo Bill Pay Helps Bring in Younger, Higher-Income Customers, U.S. Bank Exec Says

  By John Stewart Nearly a year after its launch, a service at U.S. Bank that lets customers enter biller details and pay bills by snapping photos of the bills with a smart phone is helping the banking giant make big gains with mobile users, a critical demographic group, a U.S. …
• 27 February

  PayPal Secures Spots on New Samsung Smart Phone And Smart Watch

    Consumers carrying around the next-generation Samsung Galaxy S5 smart phone will be able to use PayPal with a tap on the device’s biometric sensor. The smart phone, scheduled for release in April, will have a fingerprint sensor that enables consumers to use their online PayPal accounts to pay for …
• 27 February

  Mobile-Payments Provider for Parking Looks to Serve Offers for Nearby Businesses to Users

  PayByPhone Technologies Inc., which runs mobile-payment programs for parking in half a dozen U.S. cities, is looking for ways to serve relevant offers to users of its system, a top executive with the company said Thursday. n The offers, for example, could include discounts at stores or restaurants near where …
• 26 February

  First Data’s Star Network Casts Its Lot With Visa’s Identifier for Chip-Card Transaction Routing

  Payment processor First Data Corp.’s Star electronic funds transfer network on Wednesday said it would license Visa Inc.’s so-called common application identifier (AID) that will facilitate chip-based debit card transactions compliant with the transaction-routing requirements of the Durbin Amendment in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. The agreement with Visa could give Star, …
• 25 February

  Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange Goes Dark, Leaving Bitcoin Owners With Questions

    Mt. Gox, a well-known Bitcoin exchange, has shut down, leaving investors who had Bitcoins at the digital-currency exchange wondering what’s next. Bitcoin is a decentralized digital-payment system based on mathematically derived new Bitcoins coming into circulation by so-called “miners” using computers. News service Reuters reports today that the exchange …
• 24 February

  Neiman Marcus Downsizes by Two-Thirds Its Tally of Cards Compromised in Breach

  In a rare piece of good, or least not as bad, news about the recent retailer payment card data breaches, upscale department-store chain Neiman Marcus Group says about 350,000 cards were compromised by the breach it disclosed in January, down from its earlier estimate of 1.1 million. The number of …
• 24 February

  By Snapping up C-Sam, MasterCard Bolsters Mobile Capability, Matches Rivals

    MasterCard Inc.’s purchase Monday of C-Sam Inc., a mobile wallet technology company, boosts the card brand’s ability to provide mobile wallet services via a variety of payment methods, suggests a payment analyst. MasterCard paid an undisclosed amount for the Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based C-Sam, which began offering a mobile wallet …
• 20 February

  EMV Chip Cards and Revenue Streams Worry Independent ATM Deployers

  The coming of Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards along with pressures on interchange and surcharge revenues are the top three concerns of U.S. ATM independent sales organizations and other retail deployers, according to survey results from the ATM Industry Association. The trade group’s annual survey of what’s on its members’ minds …
• 20 February

  Loop Mobile Wallet Debuts With Expectation of Near Ubiquitous Acceptance

    Loop, a mobile wallet that uses a case or fob to generate its own contactless field to communicate with many payment terminals, has launched for the latest iPhone models. The brainchild of payments veterans George Wallner, founder of point-of-sale terminal maker Hypercom Corp., now Equinox Payments LLC, and Will …
• 19 February

  MasterCard, Visa Release Specs To Enable NFC Payments That Bypass the Secure Element

  A form of near-field communication that does not require a secure element to complete a mobile payment now has the formal backing of card brands MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. Each of them announced today their respective contactless payment schemes support so-called host card emulation. Host card emulation got a …