Visa

It has been 63 years since Frank McNamara invented the credit card, and those little pieces of plastic are everywhere. But now, a groundbreaking new technology could upend the industry he created.

Visa said Wednesday that its fiscal first-quarter profit rose 16 percent, as card use rose both in the U.S. and overseas. The San Francisco-based payments processor posted a notable 10 percent increase in U.S. credit card use. But debit card use rose just 6 percent. That's the slowest debit card growth rate in more than a year, and comes during the first three-month period that new rules were in place to limit the fees retailers pay to accept the cards.

Sometimes it pays to wait; sometimes it doesn't. Just ask the roughly 10 million cardholders who were part of the Foreign Currency Conversion Fee Antitrust class action lawsuit settlement. After a decade of legal wrangling, the settlement funds are finally being disbursed -- but a suit this large can dilute even $336 million.

Washington's efforts at financial reform keep having strange and unintended consequences. In response to a law that was meant to lower excessive debit card transaction fees on merchants, Visa and Mastercard found a way to raise the fees on a host of small businesses.

Warren Buffett is arguably the best investor of our time, so it pays to watch the stocks that he's buying and selling. Here are five of Berkshire Hathaway's new investments.

Increased use of debit and credit cards throughout the world pushed Visa Inc.'s fiscal fourth-quarter profit up 14 percent. But its quarterly revenue came in shy of Wall Street expectations, in part because because the company has been cutting deals with merchants to hold onto or attract business as it tries to cope with new regulations.

New and higher debit card fees may not be enough to satiate the big banks. Financial institutions looking for revenue are now eyeing another source: Selling your debit-card transaction data to marketers. So which is worth more to you: The deals such targeted advertising will bring, or your privacy?