The growing market in DVD rentals from vending machines became more competitive this week when video-rental icon Blockbuster Inc. announced a deal with NCR Corp. in which the maker of ATMs, other banking hardware, and kiosks this quarter will begin deploying the first of what it expects could be 10,000 …

Lending took a bit out of travel-and-entertainment card leader American Express Co.'s second-quarter profits, but discount revenue still grew. Meanwhile, Fifth Third Processing Solutions outperformed its struggling parent company, and USA Technologies Inc. reported that transactions on its network of unattended machines more than doubled while sales of contactless card-reading …

International Merchant Services Inc., which has taken on all new senior management over the past 11 months, is launching a new marketing blitz this week whose underlying message might be characterized as impatience with the electronic transactions business. Hoping to accelerate the progress of promising payment technology that for a …

Technology's great, but new payments platforms and systems will have to overcome consumers' security fears even if banks, processors, and technology vendors think such fears are overblown. That was one of the messages from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's 2008 Payments Conference on Friday, a conference specifically devoted to …

Riding the swelling wave of issuer interest in contactless payment cards, Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp this week launched a program to issue Visa Inc.'s payWave contactless cards on debit accounts in California, Colorado, Missouri, and Utah. The bank didn't say how many cards it plans to issue. Customers who already have …

French chipmaker Inside Contactless this week announced it has shipped more than 50 million MicroPass chips for contactless payments since introducing the product in November 2005. And, though the company used the occasion to promote its optimism about contactless payments in North America particularly, a number of observers remain skeptical …

Washington Mutual Inc.'s announcement this week that it plans to issue 12 million to 15 million debit cards with MasterCard Inc.'s PayPass contactless functionality this year may do more than make the $328 billion bank the No. 1 PayPass issuer. It just might give the nascent contactless market enough critical …

An absence of incentives?particularly for merchants?is handicapping contactless payments in the U.S., and by extension mobile payment at the point of sale could suffer, according to a new report. About 40,000 U.S. merchants now accept contactless cards and fobs, or 0.5% of all merchant locations. That number will grow to …

In a development that could long complicate the introduction of commercial services allowing consumers to make point-of-sale payments with their mobile phones, mobile network operators say they will derive POS payment revenue chiefly from consumer transaction fees. According to research released this week, some 83% of carriers responding to an …

Lack of consumer awareness regarding contactless transaction technology ranks as a leading concern among retailers and may ultimately impede development of contactless payments based on mobile phones, research released this week indicates. Yet most merchants that have adopted contactless programs don't promote those programs to their customers, according to the …