June, 2018

• 29 June

  A Future the Payments Industry Should Demand for Digital

  

  The global networks’ ambition for streamlined e-commerce with a single buy button sounds great—until you consider all the implications and ponder the unanswered questions. Here’s an alternative approach. As consumers leverage digital channels more often for transacting, there has been a sense of optimism that new technology players offering creative …

May, 2018

• 1 May

  Postpone the Requiem for Cash

  

  Despite what you hear about electronic payments displacing coins and folding money, the real story is a little more complicated. The world is flat. Or at least that’s what most people believed until Aristotle around 330 B.C. provided evidence of a spherical Earth. Even then, it was slow to catch …
• 1 May

  Payment Improvements Take the Long Way Home

  

  The U.S. is finally moving toward faster and more secure payments, but the process is far more deliberate than it needs to be. Look at Australia for an example of how it could be done better. Observers of the U.S. payments industry can be forgiven for wondering—in the wake of …

October, 2017

• 31 October

  The Fed’s Path to Safer—Not Just Faster—Payments

  

  Whether the legacy payments players like it or not, the case is strong for much greater intervention by the Fed in improving payments. With July’s release of Part Two of the Faster Payments Task Force Final Report, which speculated that near real-time payments could/should be on the payments scene by …

September, 2017

• 1 September

  The Future of Payments: Standards, Interoperability, And Access

  

  Proprietary standards for crucial technologies like EMV and tokenization are crimping competition in the payments industry. Here’s how to fix that. As new payments technologies evolve and quickly become mainstream, businesses and consumers should have the whole story. The public has been told these new technologies are stronger and more …

February, 2017

• 1 February

  The Great EMV Hangover

  

  The payments business has had more than a year of chip card struggles. Now, a long-time observer of the payments industry argues there is a better solution for the threat of rising fraud. As 2016 wound to a close, nothing short of a massive business hangover loomed over the U.S. …

January, 2017

• 1 January

  What the Age of Trump Means for Payments

  

  Generally, the prospects for overweening regulation and lawless intervention are dimmer, and that’s a good thing. A healthy and innovative financial-services and payments industry is vital for economic growth. Yet, for the last eight years, Washington’s boot has been on its throat. It’s been battered by the Card Act, Dodd-Frank …

December, 2016

• 1 December

  The New Battle: Surcharge Fraud

  

  How some unscrupulous players are bilking unsuspecting merchants by promising fast—but expensive—ways to recover acceptance costs. A surcharge is a fee that is added to a card transaction, either as a set amount or a percentage of the transaction, typically to allow the merchant to recover all or part of …

November, 2016

• 1 November

  The Parallel Universe in Faster Payments

  

  All the talk about real-time transactions has focused on non-card rails. But all the action has centered on a little-known transaction type that just happens to be offered by Visa and MasterCard. The late summer’s rash of announcements for ready-to-go, real-time payments without the need for a big new network …

October, 2016

• 1 October

  The Durbin Amendment And the Future of Interchange

  

  The effort to repeal the Durbin debit regulations ignores deeper issues in the U.S payments industry, including the problems created by a flawed pricing system. U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, recently introduced H.R. 5465, a bill that would repeal the Durbin Amendment. This bill comes on the heels of many …