TYPES OF TRANSACTIONS AND PAYMENT ONLINE TOOLS

MasterCard
MasterCard Worldwide (NYSE: MA) is an American multinational corporation with its headquarters in the MasterCard International Global Headquarters in Harrison, New York, United States. Throughout the world, its principal business is to process payments between the banks of merchants and the banks of purchasers that use its "MasterCard" brand debit and credit cards to make purchases. MasterCard Worldwide has been a publicly traded company since 2006. Prior to its initial public offering, MasterCard Worldwide was a membership organization owned by the 25,000+ financial institutions that issue its card.

MasterCard, originally known as MasterCharge, was created by several California banks as a competitor to the BankAmericard issued by Bank of America, which later became the Visa credit card issued by Visa Inc. The original banks behind MasterCharge were United California Bank (later First Interstate Bank and subsequently merged into Wells Fargo Bank), Wells Fargo, Crocker National Bank (also subsequently merged into Wells Fargo), and the Bank of California (subsequently merged into the Union Bank of California).

In 1966 the aforementioned group of California banks formed the Interbank Card Association (ICA). With the help of New York's Marine Midland Bank, now HSBC Bank USA, these banks joined with the ICA to create "Master Charge: The Interbank Card". The card was given a significant boost in 1969, when First National City Bank joined, merging its proprietary Everything Card with Master Charge.

In 1979, "Master Charge: The Interbank Card" was renamed simply "MasterCard". In the early 1990s MasterCard bought the British Access card and the Access name was dropped. In 2002, MasterCard International merged with Europay International SA, another large credit-card issuer association, which for many years issued cards under the name Eurocard.

In 2006, MasterCard International underwent another name change to MasterCard Worldwide. This was done in order to suggest a more global scale of operations. In addition, the company introduced a new corporate logo adding a third circle to the two that had been used in the past (the familiar card logo, resembling a Venn diagram, remains unchanged). A new corporate tagline was introduced at the same time: "The Heart of Commerce

Many issuing institutions include various features with credit card accounts, such as extended warranties on items bought with the card, damage waiver on cars rented with the card, and accident insurance during travel bought with the card.

The company, which had been organized as a cooperative of banks, had an initial public offering on May 25, 2006 at $39.00 USD. The stock is traded on the NYSE under the symbol MA.

Both MasterCard and Visa have paid approximately $3 billion in damages resulting from a class-action lawsuit filed by Hagens Berman in January 1996. The litigation cites several retail giants as plaintiffs, including Wal-Mart, Sears Roebuck & Company, and Safeway.

MasterCard's current advertising campaign tagline is "Priceless". The slogan associated with the campaign is "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard." The Priceless campaign in more recent iterations has been applicable to both MasterCard's credit card and debit card products. They also use the 'Priceless' description to promote products such as their "priceless travel" site which features deals and offers for MasterCard holders.

The first of these Priceless ads was run during the World Series in 1997 and there are numerous different TV, radio and print ads. It was idealized by Stewart Emery. MasterCard actually registered Priceless as a trademark. Actor Billy Crudup has been the voice in the US market; in the UK, actor Jack Davenport is the voice.

The purpose of the campaign is to position MasterCard as a friendly credit card company with a sense of humor, as well as respond to the public's worry that everything is being commodified and that people are becoming too materialistic.

Many parodies have been made using this same pattern, especially on Comedy Central, though MasterCard has threatened legal action, contending that MasterCard views such parodies as a violation of its rights under the federal and state trademark and unfair competition laws, under the federal and state anti-dilution laws, and under the Copyright Act. Despite these claims, however, noted US consumer advocate and presidential candidate Ralph Nader emerged victorious (after a four-year battle) in the suit MasterCard brought against him after he produced his own "Priceless" political commercials.

Through a new partnership with an Internet company that specializes in personalized shopping, MasterCard introduced a Web shopping mall on April 16, 2010 that it says can pinpoint with considerable accuracy what its cardholders are likely to purchase.

The site, called MasterCard MarketPlace, relies on technology developed by Next Jump, a New York company that monitors customer behavior from thousands of retailers and uses the data it gathers to help merchants tailor their product offerings.

MasterCard currently sponsors the New Zealand All Blacks, the country's rugby union team. MasterCard also sponsors the UEFA Champions League. For many years, it also sponsored FIFA World Cup but withdrew its contract after a court settlement and its rival Visa took up the contract in 2007. It is currently the sponsor of the Memorial Cup Tournament of the Canadian Hockey League. MasterCard has just announced new sponsorship deal with Australian Cricket team and is also the founding sponsor of IPL cricket team Mumbai Indians. It was the official credit card of UEFA Euro 2008.

In 1997, MasterCard was the main sponsor of the aborted MasterCard Lola Formula One team.
On October 12, 2007 MasterCard offered $160,000 to the municipal government of Toronto so that the city could keep its ice rinks open, as the city was facing a budget shortfall.

Visa Debit
Visa Debit is a major debit card issued by Visa in the United Kingdom, Ireland and other European Union countries[1]. Prior to October 2004, the debit card was known as Visa Delta. Since June 2009, the major banks in the UK have begun issuing Visa Debit. Barclays, Bank of Scotland/Halifax, Lloyds TSB, and Santander have already issued the card. HSBC, RBS (including NatWest and Ulster Bank) are currently in the process of migrating to the card from the Switch debit card.

The scheme is also used by many smaller banks and building societies (some of whom had also previously been Switch issuers) including the Co-operative Bank, First Trust Bank, Alliance & Leicester, Northern Rock, Reliance Bank, Nationwide and Coventry Building Society. Even though the product is available and advertised in Canada, no Visa-issuing financial institution currently offers a Visa Debit card in Canada.

The obverse and reverse of the cards are similar to a Visa credit card, including the “VISA” logotype and the dove hologram.

From the phase-out of the Visa Delta branding until 2006, cards displayed the VISA tricolour flag trademark, with the addition of the words "DEBIT" or "DEBIT CARD". On the back, cards issued before October 2004 display the Delta logo, and usually also a cheque guarantee logo.

In 2006, card issuers began removing the Visa trademark "flag" logo from all their cards, websites and retailers' windows. The flag had originated as the branding for the BankAmericard credit card programme, the forerunner of Visa Inc. that included the UK's Barclaycard and French Carte Bleue.

For all Delta cards, the new logo was a white background with the name “VISA” in blue with an orange flick on the 'V' (illustrated). This is immediately followed by the word "Debit". This signalled a definite end of "Visa Delta" in those countries that used it.

The new logotype was also applied to other VISA operations, including credit cards and the VISA Electron electronic debit card.

The card can be used just like a Visa credit card both internationally and in the UK. Retailers in some countries can however accept the card as a debit card rather than a normal Visa card. In this case, the store is not charged a percentage, but rather a small fixed charge of around £0.50 per transaction. All transactions are in any case processed through the Visa clearing system, using the same card number, distinguishing it from other national debit card schemes which can be combined with Visa on a credit card. Customers might be charged a fee by their bank, for example, when buying foreign currency in the UK (up to 2%)

Credit card
A credit card is a small plastic card issued to users as a system of payment. It allows its holder to buy goods and services based on the holder's promise to pay for these goods and services. The issuer of the card creates a revolving account and grants a line of credit to the consumer (or the user) from which the user can borrow money for payment to a merchant or as a cash advance to the user. Usage of the term "credit card" to imply a credit card account is a metonym.

A credit card is different from a charge card: a charge card requires the balance to be paid in full each month. In contrast, credit cards allow the consumers a continuing balance of debt, subject to interest being charged. Most credit cards are issued by banks or credit unions, and are the shape and size specified by the ISO/IEC 7810 standard as ID-1. This is defined as 85.60 × 53.98 mm (3.370 × 2.125 in) (33/8 × 21/8 in) in size.

The concept of using a card for purchases was described in 1887 by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy used the term credit card eleven times in this novel.

The modern credit card was the successor of a variety of merchant credit schemes. It was first used in the 1920s, in the United States, specifically to sell fuel to a growing number of automobile owners. In 1938 several companies started to accept each other's cards. Western Union had begun issuing charge cards to its frequent customers in 1921. Some charge cards were printed on paper card stock, but were easily counterfeited.

The Charga-Plate was an early predecessor to the credit card and used in the U.S. from the 1930s to the late 1950s. It was a 2½" × 1¼" rectangle of sheet metal, similar to a military dog tag, and embossed with the customer's name, city and state. It held a small paper card for a signature. In recording a purchase, the plate was laid into a recess in the imprinter, with a paper "charge slip" positioned on top of it. The record of the transaction included an impression of the embossed information, made by the imprinter pressing an inked ribbon against the charge slip. Charga-Plate was a trademark of Farrington Manufacturing Co. Charga-Plates were issued by large-scale merchants to their regular customers, much like department store credit cards of today. In some cases, the plates were kept in the issuing store rather than held by customers. When an authorized user made a purchase, a clerk retrieved the plate from the store's files and then processed the purchase. Charga-Plates speeded back-office bookkeeping that was done manually in paper ledgers in each store, before computers.

The concept of customers paying different merchants using the same card was implemented in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank X. McNamara, founders of Diners Club, to consolidate multiple cards. The Diners Club, which was created partially through a merger with Dine and Sign, produced the first "general purpose" charge card, and required the entire bill to be paid with each statement. That was followed by Carte Blanche and in 1958 by American Express which created a worldwide credit card network (although these were initially charge cards that acquired credit card features after BankAmericard demonstrated the feasibility of the concept).

However, until 1958, no one had been able to create a working revolving credit financial instrument issued by a third-party bank that was generally accepted by a large number of merchants (as opposed to merchant-issued revolving cards accepted by only a few merchants). A dozen experiments by small American banks had been attempted (and had failed). In an odd coincidence, both of the products that finally succeeded were born in the U.S. state of California. In September 1958, Bank of America launched the BankAmericard in Fresno, California. BankAmericard became the first successful recognizably modern credit card (although it underwent a troubled gestation during which its creator resigned), and with its overseas affiliates, eventually evolved into the Visa system. In 1966, the ancestor of MasterCard was born when a group of California banks established Master Charge to compete with BankAmericard; it received a significant boost when Citibank merged its proprietary Everything Card (launched in 1967) into Master Charge in 1969.

Early credit cards in the U.S., of which BankAmericard was the most prominent example, were mass produced and mass mailed to bank customers who were thought to be good credit risks; that is, they were unsolicited. These mass mailings were known as "drops" in banking terminology, and were outlawed in 1970 due to the financial chaos that they caused, but not before 100 million credit cards had been dropped into the U.S. population. After 1970, only credit card applications could be sent unsolicited in mass mailings.

The fractured nature of the U.S. banking system under the Glass-Steagall Act meant that credit cards became an effective way for those who were traveling around the country to move their credit to places where they could not directly use their banking facilities. In 1966 Barclaycard in the UK launched the first credit card outside of the U.S.

There are now countless variations on the basic concept of revolving credit for individuals (as issued by banks and honored by a network of financial institutions), including organization-branded credit cards, corporate-user credit cards, store cards and so on.

In contrast, although having reached very high adoption levels in the US, Canada and the UK, it is important to note that many cultures were much more cash-oriented in the latter half of the twentieth century, or had developed alternative forms of cash-less payments, such as Carte bleue or the Eurocard (Germany, France, Switzerland, and others). In these places, the take-up of credit cards was initially much slower. It took until the 1990s to reach anything like the percentage market-penetration levels achieved in the US, Canada, or the UK. In many countries acceptance still remains poor as the use of a credit card system depends on the banking system being perceived as reliable. Of particular note is Japan, which remains a very cash oriented society, with credit card adoption being limited to only the largest of merchants, although an alternative system based on RFIDs inside cellphones has seen some acceptance.

In contrast, because of the legislative framework surrounding banking system overdrafts, some countries, France in particular, were much faster to develop and adopt chip-based credit cards which are now seen as major anti-fraud credit devices.

The design of the credit card itself has become a major selling point in recent years. The value of the card to the issuer is often related to the customer's usage of the card, or to the customer's financial worth. This has led to the rise of Co-Brand and Affinity cards - where the card design is related to the "affinity" (a university, for example) leading to higher card usage. In most cases a percentage of the value of the card is returned to the affinity group.

Credit cards are issued after an account has been approved by the credit provider, after which cardholders can use it to make purchases at merchants accepting that card. Merchants often advertise which cards they accept by displaying acceptance marks – generally derived from logos – or may communicate this orally, as in "Credit cards are fine" (implicitly meaning "major brands"), "We take (brands X, Y, and Z)", or "We don't take credit cards".

When a purchase is made, the credit card user agrees to pay the card issuer. The cardholder indicates consent to pay by signing a receipt with a record of the card details and indicating the amount to be paid or by entering a personal identification number (PIN). Also, many merchants now accept verbal authorizations via telephone and electronic authorization using the Internet, known as a card not present transaction (CNP).

Electronic verification systems allow merchants to verify in a few seconds that the card is valid and the credit card customer has sufficient credit to cover the purchase, allowing the verification to happen at time of purchase. The verification is performed using a credit card payment terminal or point-of-sale (POS) system with a communications link to the merchant's acquiring bank. Data from the card is obtained from a magnetic stripe or chip on the card; the latter system is called Chip and PIN in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and is implemented as an EMV card.

For card not present transactions where the card is not shown (e.g., e-commerce, mail order, and telephone sales), merchants additionally verify that the customer is in physical possession of the card and is the authorised user by asking for additional information such as the security code printed on the back of the card, date of expiry, and billing address.

Each month, the credit card user is sent a statement indicating the purchases undertaken with the card, any outstanding fees, and the total amount owed. After receiving the statement, the cardholder may dispute any charges that he or she thinks are incorrect (see Fair Credit Billing Act for details of the US regulations). Otherwise, the cardholder must pay a defined minimum proportion of the bill by a due date, or may choose to pay a higher amount up to the entire amount owed. The credit issuer charges interest on the amount owed if the balance is not paid in full (typically at a much higher rate than most other forms of debt). Some financial institutions can arrange for automatic payments to be deducted from the user's bank accounts, thus avoiding late payment altogether as long as the cardholder has sufficient funds.

Electronic Payment Services
Established in 1984, EPS Company (Hong Kong) Limited (formerly Electronic Payment Services Company) is currently a consortium of 21 major banks in Hong Kong. In each retail location, a terminal is installed and is usually connected to a POS system of retailer. The terminal can also connect to banks through the public phone system.

The operation of the system is easy. The retailer swipes a customer's ATM card in the terminal and keys in the payment amount. The cardholder then selects the appropriate bank account and keys in the PIN. After successful connection to the bank, a receipt will be printed for the customer and the retailer. Some automatic terminals require the cardholder to insert his or her ATM card into a terminal machine rather than have the merchant swipe the card.

Payment for each transaction is directly transferred from the payer's bank account to receiver's.
EPS is simple use of ATM card or credit card with ATM function, no application of service is required. All ATM cards or credit cards with ATM function issued by EPS Company member banks could perform EPS function.

Consumer simply presents the ATM card to the cashier. Cashier swipes consumer's card and enter the transaction amount. Comsumer confirm the amount by inputting ATM card PIN. EPS receipts are printed with "ACCEPTED" for successful transaction.

With EPS EasyCash, consumer can withdraw cash at over 1,200 locations in Hong Kong upon purchase with EPS. The cash withdrawal amount can be in multiples of HK$100, at a maximum of HK$500. EPS EasyCash service is also commonly known as Cashback service.

EPS EasyCash service is currently available at chain store of Gourmet, Great, IKEA, Mannings, MarketPlace, Massimo Dutti, Circle K, Oliver's, Parknshop, Taste, Threesizty, Vango, China Resources Vanguard (CRV), V'ole and Wellcome in Hong Kong.

Maestro (debit card)
Maestro is a multi-national debit card service owned by MasterCard, and was founded in 1990. Maestro cards are obtained from associate banks and can be linked to the card holder's current account, or they can be prepaid cards. The cardholder presents the card at the point of sale (POS) and this is swiped through the terminal by the assistant or the customer or inserted into a chip and PIN device. The payment is authorised by the card issuer to ensure that the cardholder has sufficient funds in their account to make the purchase and the cardholder confirms the payment by either signing the sales receipt or entering their 4 to 6-digit PIN.

Within the EU and certain other countries, Maestro is MasterCard's main debit brand and is the equivalent of signature debit card which does not require electronic authorisation, similar to the Visa Debit card. In most other countries, Maestro is equivalent to a Visa Electron and is MasterCard's tertiary card. It requires electronic authorisation much like a Solo debit card, i.e. not only must the information stored in either the chip or the magnetic stripe be read, this has to be sent from the Merchant to the issuing bank, the issuing bank then has to respond with an affirmative authorisation. If the information is not read, the issuer will decline the transaction, regardless of any disposable amount on the connected account. This is different from other debit and credit cards, where the information can be entered manually into the terminal (i.e. by punching the 13 to 19 digits and the expiry date on the terminal) and still be approved by the issuer or stand-in processor.