November, 2020

• 2 November

  The Fed Inches Toward Real Time

  

  In August last year, when the Federal Reserve announced it would jump into the real-time payments arena, proponents of the idea were elated. A public sector competitor would be needed, they argued, to offset the rapidly advancing network at The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, an entity owned by 25 …

October, 2020

• 1 October

  Contactless Doesn’t Always Mean NFC

  

  If you haven’t noticed stores adopting contactless payments all of a sudden, you haven’t gotten out much in recent months. With a raging pandemic scaring customers away from touching surfaces such as PIN pads and other point-of-sale technology, retailers are rushing to install NFC-equipped devices that will let patrons wave …

September, 2020

• 1 September

  Wall Street And the Payments Biz

  

  As we look at the numbers at precisely 3:15 p.m. Eastern Time on Aug. 17, most of the payments and payments-related stocks we track are up for the day. Indeed, out of a basket of some 17 stocks, only four are down—and there’s still part of the afternoon left. Some, …

August, 2020

• 1 August

  Your Desktop Reference for Months to Come

  

  Here it is August, and the world is still reckoning with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, the world will be at that grim task for many months to come, we fear, until researchers develop, test, and mass-produce an effective vaccine. In the meantime, the business of payments goes …

July, 2020

• 1 July

  A Resilient Industry

  

  We here at Digital Transactions have for the past few months been considering the impact the novel coronavirus is having on the payments business, along with the adjustments the business is making to contend with business lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and social-distancing recommendations. Now the country is re-opening in many states …

June, 2020

• 1 June

  What’s on the Other Side?

  

  Much attention has been focused on the damage Covid-19 has wreaked on state and national economies, not to say on the lives of citizens. But we are entering a time when it may be possible to consider also what a post-pandemic world may look like. Certainly, some of the payments …

May, 2020

• 1 May

  Shape of Things to Come

  

  What will the payments business look like when, God willing, the coronavirus vaccine becomes available and the plague lifts? That’s one of the questions we’ve been batting around here at Digital Transactions, so in this issue we decided to take a shot at answering it. The results can be found …

April, 2020

• 1 April

  Thoughts in the Time of Plague

  

  At the time of this writing, a plague has descended on the world, and it’s not likely to have lifted by the time you read this column. Covid-19, a respiratory disease caused by a novel form of the coronavirus, originated in China this winter but has now swept through countries …

March, 2020

• 1 March

  Chucking the Checkout

  

  Just as we were preparing to send this issue to press, news came about an interesting effort in Germany to steal a march on developing a checkout-free store. An outfit called VR Payment has created a service called payfree that uses radio-frequency identification technology to let stores scan tags on …

February, 2020

• 1 February

  Crypto Dad’s Digital Dollar

  

  We were no sooner digesting the latest—and rather dour—developments about Facebook’s Libra project than news broke last month that a group including a former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was starting an initiative to develop a so-called digital dollar. Indeed, the group, which has enlisted the resources of …