September, 2021

• 1 September

  Summer’s Heat Is on Card Costs

  

  You could be forgiven for neglecting the battle between merchants, on the one hand, and banks and payments networks on the other, over acceptance costs for payment cards. After all, the conflict is a long-running affair, and other issues have crowded onto the scene in recent months. But this summer …

August, 2021

• 1 August

  A Remarkable Industry

  

  Welcome to Digital Transactions’ annual Buyer’s Guide. Here, you’ll find just about all the products and services—along with the vendors and their contact information—you’ll need to run your business. Or to start one, for that matter. We have found over the years that the payments industry, particularly in the United …

July, 2021

• 1 July

  Asset or Money?

  

  It has been fashionable in the payments industry to dismiss cryptocurrencies as exotic flora and fauna that can’t begin to compete with the sturdiness of, shall we say, real money. And indeed, the oldest crypto coins have been in operation now for more than a decade with little to show …

June, 2021

• 1 June

  A Humble Homecoming

  

  Libra—er, sorry, Diem—is coming home to the United States, a bit bruised but also a bit wiser than when it left. Bruised but unbowed, the Facebook-inspired blockchain initiative announced in May it is quitting Switzerland and linking up with La Jolla, Calif.-based Silvergate Bank as it plots the next stage …

April, 2021

• 30 April

  The Skunk at the Party

  

  The craze for point-of-sale installment lending—a trend popularly known as buy now, pay later—has enjoyed a honeymoon among merchants and consumers alike. The option, which lets consumers receive the goods in their cart but pay for them later over a few interest-free installments, came along just as pandemic fears threatened …
• 1 April

  The Age of Miracles

  

  Sometimes you get what you want if you just ask—and if you have the right people asking for you. Just before we went to press with this issue, Visa and Mastercard released the news that they were holding off on planned interchange-rate adjustments for another year, until April 2022. Their …

February, 2021

• 28 February

  So Where’s the Depression?

  

  A year ago this month, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States had overrun hospitals with Covid-19 cases, closed businesses and public places, and sent the Dow Jones Industrial average plummeting about 9,000 points to a level it hadn’t seen since the fall of 2016. The economic …

January, 2021

• 29 January

  The Digital Dollar Revisited

  

  One year ago in this space, in the waning days of the pre-Covid Age, we presented some thoughts about the newly established Digital Dollar Foundation and its proposal for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for the United States. Since then, the notion of CBDCs has attracted much attention as …
• 1 January

  GoDaddy Gets the Poynt

  

  You may have read last month that the huge Web domain registrar and hosting service GoDaddy is buying a POS terminal startup called Poynt. The deal calls for $320 million in cash upfront and another $45 million in cash down the road. That’s not a bad payday for a company …

December, 2020

• 1 December

  The Network of Networks

  

  Have you noticed lately that the so-called card networks are talking less and less about cards? This seems especially true of what we used to call the two big bank card networks, Visa and Mastercard. They ceased formally being “bank” card networks when they went public a decade ago, and …