February, 2018

• 1 February

  Primetime for Amazon Pay

  

  Amazon long ago mastered e-commerce, and now its payments unit is making moves in physical stores and in voice commerce. Will it succeed here as it has online? In the fall of 2009, a certain big company in Seattle launched a service that let consumers authenticate themselves for online purchases …

January, 2018

• 2 January

  Whatever Happened to Encryption?

  

  Widely touted as a potent data-masking tool, encryption has been slow to take hold in the payments industry, despite a continuing plague of data breaches. Here’s what’s going on to change that. Kmart, Arby’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Hyatt Hotels.  Those are just some of the merchants that reported data breaches …

December, 2017

• 1 December

  Signing Off

  

  Mastercard’s decision to remove the  signature requirement comes as authentication  measures improve in the payments industry.  But what comes next is still a huge question. As unique as signatures are, their value as a way of authenticating a credit or debit card transaction has long passed, a realization many consumers …

October, 2017

• 31 October

  11th Annual The 10 Most Pressing Issues in E-Payments

  

  Our daunting set of sticky wickets this time ranges from data breaches that just don’t stop to debit card pitfalls to travails for P2P and Bitcoin. This is Digital Transactions magazine’s 11th annual ranking of payments woes, and one lesson we’ve learned in all that time is that they don’t …
• 1 October

  A World To Conquer

  

  Despite obstacles, payment processors and fintechs increasingly are looking at cross-border e-commerce for high-growth opportunities. Go global. That’s the credo an increasing number of payment processors and financial-technology firms subscribe to as technology transforms cross-border commerce from yesterday’s luxury into an attainable option for consumers today. Researcher Talie Baker, a …

September, 2017

• 1 September

  The Sweet 16

  

  The Faster Payments Task Force issued a final report in July with an eye-popping goal: National, real-time payments by 2020. Here’s a guide to the 16 providers that might just do the job. In July, the Federal Reserve-sponsored Faster Payments Task Force capped off two years of hard work with …

August, 2017

• 1 August

  Digital Transactions 2017 Buyer’s Guide

  The Digital Transactions Buyer’s Guide is available as an online, searchable database. Click here to start your search. Want to be included in the Buyer’s Guide? Get the form here.

July, 2017

• 1 July

  The Durbin Amendment: Half a Decade Later

  

  No law in the history of electronic payments has had more impact—or stirred more controversy—than Sen. Durbin’s debit card rules. With emotions running high, will it survive the next half decade? In 2010, the U.S. Congress succeeded in doing something other Western nations had long since done but had always …

June, 2017

• 1 June

  Hard to Swallow?

  

  The U.S. conversion to EMV is close to two years old now, and in its wake have come unquestioned benefits. But this cure for widespread counterfeit card fraud also has ushered in excruciating side effects. It’s easy to forget that the Europay-Mastercard-Visa chip card standard is more than 20 years …

May, 2017

• 1 May

  Ninth Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments

  

  The increasing commercialization of mobile payments is showing up in a proliferation of so-called Pays from a bevy of banks, tech companies, and merchants. Time was, a cutting-edge alternative-payment service involved entering card or bank-account details into a branded interface on a laptop computer. Mobile payments were nascent, held back …