Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

In an effort to become easier for merchant acquirers, merchants, and card issuers to deal with, Visa Inc. late this year will eliminate almost 50% of its operating rules, which currently total more than 1,500 pages, chief executive Charles W. Scharf said Thursday. Scharf made that revelation at Visa’s second-quarter …

A revised set of network fees from Visa Inc. could hit merchant aggregators hard when the revisions take effect next April, according to payments-industry sources. Depending on the size and number of aggregators’ sponsored merchants, the revisions could significantly boost actual fee payments as well as drive up programming and …

  An industry as intrinsic to commerce as electronic payments is unlikely to make wholesale moves to new technologies like mobile payments. That applies to consumers, too, who appear to be moderating their use of mobile payments. Data from the IDC Financial Insights 2014 Consumer Payments Survey reveal that consumer …

American Express Co. deepened its prepaid card relationship with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. with Monday’s announcement that its Serve card will be sold in 4,100 U.S. Walmart-branded stores. The Walmart stores also will become part of Serve’s cash-reload network, boosting its location count to 19,500. Serve’s thus will become the biggest …

  Independent sales organizations and acquirers have long known the value of performing their due diligence when boarding new merchants. That’s become even more important as law enforcement turns to the payments industry to find merchants that run afoul of consumers and the law. That has put more pressure on …

Less than a month after electronic gift card provider Gyft announced it was selling Wal-Mart Stores Inc. gift cards, they no longer are available. According to a report on Coindesk.com, a digital-currency news site, Gyft stopped offering Wal-Mart gift cards on April 13. Gyft provides electronic gift card services for …

It may be headquartered in Leawood, Kan., but payment-services provider Euronet Worldwide Inc. looks abroad for most of its revenues. Thanks to a new deal with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., however, Euronet’s Ria unit is about to become a major force in domestic wire transfers. Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart on Thursday unveiled …

A less costly, software-based way to handle mobile transactions using near-field communication (NFC) technology is expected to begin fueling NFC payments later this year following the release of specifications from both MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. n Support from the two major international card networks comes as demand for HCE-based …

The Shazam Network on Wednesday reported that it had licensed Visa Inc.’s so-called common application identifier (AID), the third such announcement of a new Visa user in just over a week by a electronic funds transfer network. The additions of Shazam and credit-union networks Co-Op Financial Services and CU24 mean …

Visa Inc. has tweaked its controversial fixed acquirer network fee (FANF), with the changes scheduled to take effect 12 months from now, according to sources who have seen the changes. A bulletin Visa released last week and circulated to acquirers indicates the modifications to the 2-year-old FANF are aimed chiefly …

With Microsoft Corp. no longer supporting its Windows XP operating system, companies marketing tablet-based point-of-sale gear and software are hoping to garner more business from small and mid-sized businesses looking to replace POS systems that use the outmoded OS. As expected, computing giant Microsoft ceased support for the 12-year-old XP …

  Selling merchants solely on the price and availability of a diverse set of payment processing methods won’t be enough in the next year or so as merchants increasingly turn to those who can help them grow their businesses. That’s the message proponents of mobile marketing and advertising services are …

In the wake of Bitcoin’s continuing problems with price volatility and unstable processors, the future of virtual currencies got even cloudier over the past week on news that the Royal Canadian Mint plans to sell its MintChip digital-currency system.   Rumors that MintChip was on the block had been circulating …

You might call it the first stop on a long road show looming for automated clearing house network oversight body NACHA’s new proposal for same-day settlement of ACH transactions. The particular stop was a packed session at NACHA’s annual payments conference on Tuesday, where executives from financial institutions and payments …

The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, which last summer announced its effort to tokenize payment card numbers, is now mulling a related system that would similarly mask sensitive consumer information related to automated clearing house transactions, and may have a proposal ready by year’s end. “It’s something we’ve spent a …

Tablet-based point-of-sale provider Leaf Holdings Inc. is providing a marketplace to help merchant service providers find merchants. Dubbed Payments Apps, the service provides a free listing with the payment company’s contact information and a description of up to 2,000 characters. Payment companies pay $10 per month per merchant if the …

In a further escalation of its war on costly bill-payment exceptions, automated clearing house governing body NACHA on Monday announced a new program that will convert erroneous electronic bill payments that otherwise would go through as paper checks into ACH transactions with a new field where the biller can enter …

  Consumer affinity for shopping on smart phones and tablets is unlikely to abate any time soon. And that poses a problem for retailers as they try to make the payment experience easier on mobile commerce sites and apps. It’s a problem that credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc. and payments-and-authentication-services provider …

Some 43% of businesses report they were exposed to card fraud in 2013, a whopping rise of 14 percentage points from 2012, according to the latest annual fraud survey from the Association of Financial Professionals. Nonetheless, survey respondents are remarkably optimistic about the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard, with 92% …

After a string of news from Visa Inc. about partnerships with electronic funds transfer networks to facilitate debit transactions with chip cards, MasterCard Inc. got back in the game Thursday with the announcement that First Data Corp.’s Star network will use MasterCard’s so-called common application identifier (AID). n Visa has …