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In an article titled "Sticking with R&D, Even in a Downturn", Maria Aspan writes for the American Banker about US Bank's continuing focus on payments innovation.
"We can pilot things across both ends of the spectrum. We can issue and acquire in kind of a small pilot environment" without overspending or overextending the company's resources", Pamela Joseph, its vice chairman of payment services said.
American Express has announced Personal Savings from American Express, a new line of FDIC-insured certificates of deposit and high-yield savings accounts. The Personal Savings deposit accounts are offered by American Express Bank, FSB, a depository institution insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and part of the American Express family of companies. READ MORE »
The Retail Gift Card Association (RGCA), a trade association originally formed last October, has announced the addition of Darden Restaurants, AMC Entertainment, Disney, JCPenney, Lowe’s Home Improvement, L.L.Bean, Foot Locker, Bass Pro Shops, Bon Ton, SpaFinder and Giant Eagle to its membership. The RGCA - "established by retailers for retailers" - says it "understands the need to promote a more accurate depiction of the practices, sales and terms related to the closed loop gift card market."
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The Smart Card Alliance has published a new position paper titled “End-to-End Encryption and Chip Cards in the U.S. Payments Industry" that "proposes an alternative to end-to-end encryption, protecting cardholder data by using chip card technology, but in a different way than has been considered in the past."
Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, said "In our paper we discuss a different approach optimized for the U.S. payment market: using contactless chip cards, including a dynamic cryptogram with each transaction and authorizing transactions online. This stands in sharp contrast to previous considerations of implementing 'chip and PIN' based on the full EMV standard. Instead, this proposal builds on what is already happening in the U.S. -- the issuance and merchant acceptance of contactless cards -- while keeping in step with globally interoperable EMV standards." READ MORE »
American Express has announced results from the first American Express Spending & Saving Tracker finding that, while 60 percent of respondents who participated said they intend to spend about the same or more in the next 30 days, (compared to the last 30 days), 40 percent plan to spend less.
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Visa has filed an 8-K providing information about its US payments volume for July and August. According to Visa, "in August, U.S. aggregate payments volume growth was negative 1% versus the prior year period. This represents an improvement over the July period end of negative 2%. Further broken down, U.S. credit payments volume growth was negative 10% and debit payments volume growth was positive 7%. Compared to the July period end, U.S. credit payments volume was down slightly from negative 9%, while debit payments volume improved from positive 4%."
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In an article titled "Turning to Premium Credit Cards", Alex Mindlin writes for the New York Times how US credit card issuers are focusing their solicitation efforts on premium cards - including the MasterCard World and Visa Signature cards.
Note: Throughout the day, as Payments News happens, this post is updated. For job opportunities available for payments professionals, visit PaymentsJobs.com. Employers looking to hire payments professionals can post their job openings there as well.
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