All articles by Verdict Staff
Verdict Staff
American Express racks up more losses
American Express (Amex) has reported a 79 percent loss in its fourth-quarter 2008 results with net income of $172 million, compared $831 million in the year-ago period
News Digest
MasterCard bolsters development abilities… Paystone calls it quits… Barclays debit cards go contactless…
US lawmakers usher in new card rules
In an economic climate that is placing more emphasis on consumer rights, regulators in the US are rewriting the rules for credit card companies
Retailer bankruptcies hit gift card sales
A spate of retailer bankruptcies in the US has left thousands of gift cardholders in limbo Unable to use their cards, and unable to retrieve funds deposited onto the cards, cardholders and consumer groups are ratcheting up the pressure on regulators to clarify the legal situation
Fiserv develops merchant-funded scheme
Loyalty programmes have traditionally been the domain of larger banks which had the resources to fund them, but a new programme from Fiserv is helping smaller banks to offer rewards in partnership with merchants, while consumers get a choice of debit and credit rewards Fiserv, a US financial service solution provider, has developed a reward programme, UChoose Rewards, which enables customers to earn merchant-funded rewards for debit and credit card use.
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Barclays debit cards go contactless
Its Barclaycard unit has already committed itself to a contactless future (see CI 408), and was the first to introduce contactless technology on credit cards in the UK in September 2007 with the launch of Barclaycard OnePulse, the three-in-one Oyster, credit and contactless card. Now, Barclays, one of the UKs largest current account providers with 11.5 million customers as of August 2008, is ramping up its efforts to push contactless even further into UK consumer consciousness by announcing that it will be the first bank in the UK to roll out contactless functionality on its Visa-branded debit cards.
Refining portfolio management
In this months guest article, Stephen Mendelsohn, a senior manager at US payment consultancy First Annapolis, looks at how continental European card issuers can increase portfolio profitability by taking the lessons learned from the US and UK and placing more focus on the fundamentals of portfolio management. While credit and debit card issuers in continental Europe have made great strides over the past several years in increasing their numbers of cardholders, a great many of these organisations have not yet been as successful at the basic fundamentals of portfolio management for example activation, usage building and retention. Such activities, staples of large issuers in markets such as North America and the UK, are still uncommon, at least in a systematic manner, at many issuers in Europe and elsewhere, even at very large domestic players.
Chinese card growth beginning to slow
Figures for the third quarter of 2008 from the countrys central bank, the Peoples Bank of China (PBoC), show that the amount of non-cash payments declined for the first time. The amount of money involved in non-cash payments, including commercial papers and bank cards, was around CNY157.3 trillion ($22.97 trillion) in the third quarter, down 8.3 percent compared to the year-ago period, the PBoC said, proving that the countrys economy is slowing down
Korean banks look to replace debit cards with mobile phones
Now, a group of major card issuers are looking to replace debit cards with mobile phones following the launch of what is being described as a one-touch, one-chip mobile payment service South Korean telecom company KTF is launching a password-protected mobile payment service called UbiTouch, which will allow customers of 16 South Korean banks to use their 3G phones to withdraw money by touching them to one of the 39,000 ATMs across the country bearing the UbiTouch marque
VisaNet Brazil postpones initial public offering deadline
Visa and a consortium of Brazilian banks have postponed a planned initial public offering (IPO) of the national VisaNet system, according to a December 2008 filing with the countrys securities regulator. The company, which is owned by Banco Bradesco, Banco do Brasil, Visa International, and Banco ABN Amro Real, had an estimated market value of around $18.3 billion as of March 2008.