April, 2023

• 1 April

  Don’t Blame Crypto

  

  Cryptocurrency has taken a beating in the headlines ever since the FTX scandal broke last fall. But last month it got much worse as a trio of banks known for their crypto-friendly lending collapsed, sending shock waves through the larger economy. The fate of Silicon Valley Bank was especially egregious, …

March, 2023

• 1 March

  A Fast Reckoning

  

  Wow, that was fast. Last month, we ran a cover story that reviewed the track record of the three huge processor mergers that all took place within weeks of each other in 2019. With the perspective of more than three years, we thought the time had come to size up …

February, 2023

• 1 February

  Confronting the CFPB Question

  

  A federal appeals-court ruling handed down in October rattled advocates of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and they haven’t stopped quivering since. That’s because the decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit does what years of detractors’ objections and arguments have failed to do—it strikes at …

January, 2023

• 1 January

  Risk Will Always Assert Itself

  

  It has in recent days become apparent—as it has over and over again for centuries—that financial risk can only be managed and mitigated. Despite what breathless investors in the ill-fated FTX exchange may have thought, risk can neither be wished nor washed away. Ironically, the epic FTX collapse in November …
• 1 January

  How Do You Define Success?

  

  You might think a fledgling payments network that launched in July with 35 participating financial institutions and within less than six months had multiplied that number nearly tenfold could be considered at least a tentative success. Granted, there’s a long way to go for the Federal Reserve’s FedNow real-time payments …

December, 2022

• 1 December

  The Race for Real Time

  

  As the market for real-time payments continues to develop in the United States—and as the Federal Reserve prepares for a commercial launch of its own real-time network next year—the race is on to capture market share. There are a number of contenders, but one clear frontrunner is The Clearing House …

November, 2022

• 1 November

  The Law is the Law

  

  The business of routing payment card transactions has been much in the news lately, first with a bill that would legislate network choice for credit card transactions and then with action by the Federal Reserve to reinforce a requirement that was supposed to guarantee merchants a choice of networks for …

October, 2022

• 1 October

  The Great Experiment

  

  Imagine initiating a payment on your phone and seeing it settle into your payee’s account as fast—or just about as fast—as if you had handed him the same sum in cash. The dream of instant payments has been around probably for as long as electronic rails have existed for money …

September, 2022

• 1 September

  Nacha’s Million-Dollar Solution

  

  Last month, the U.S. automated clearing house network reported a double-digit increase year-over-year in transactions in the second quarter while dollar volume ballooned 94%. Nacha, the network operator, also said the volume of all transactions on the system reached 7.5 billion, up from 7.3 billion in the first quarter. That’s …

August, 2022

• 1 August

  A Remarkable 18 Months

  

  Welcome to Digital Transactions’ August issue, which is also our annual Buyers’ Guide. With this latest edition of the Guide, we thought we’d take a minute away from all the products and vendors that appear in the following pages to look at a few numbers that describe the industry. We …