May, 2018

• 1 May

  Some Promising Signs for Crypto Acceptance

  

  Seven months ago, our piece for this space was headlined, “So, Where Are We With Bitcoin?” The concern then was a steady climb in Bitcoin’s value and whether it constituted a bubble. The associated question was whether the cryptocurrency could ever establish itself as a means of payment, either online …

April, 2018

• 2 April

  An Encouraging Start

  

  After years of ever-tightening regulation in payments and other financial services, it comes as a relief to witness some of the encouraging steps Congress and the Trump administration are taking to unshackle innovation. As our Acquiring story starting on page 20 documents, movement is afoot on a broad front to …

February, 2018

• 28 February

  A Study in Overreaction

  

  We often refer to the “wisdom of the market,” investing the stock market with powers of insight almost amounting to clairvoyance. The market does, after all, efficiently compile the sentiments of entire regiments of investors into one tidy number, the stock price. We reflected on this collective wisdom last month …
• 1 February

  The Allure of Brick And Mortar

  

  Nobody knows for sure, but some time this year Amazon.com Inc. could unleash a double-barreled assault on the world of physical-store payments. As our cover story this month lays out, the Seattle colossus has already introduced Amazon Pay Places, a mobile order-ahead application for Amazon Pay, and is working to …

January, 2018

• 2 January

  Serving the Small Merchant

  

  Seldom in the history of electronic payments has the spotlight shone quite so intensely on small merchants as it does now. Everybody, it seems, wants to sign up the so-called SMB—the small and medium-size business. When Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) put up just over $1 billion last month to …

December, 2017

• 1 December

  ‘A Very Complicated, Hot Mess’

  

  The United States seems to excel at developing new electronic payment systems, but it struggles with commercializing them. Oh yes, debit card payments are nearly universal now, but if you were following this business back in the ‘80s, when networks, banks, and merchants were looking at the matter of ATM …

October, 2017

• 31 October

  The Mobile Check

  

  Periodically in this space we comment on mobile payments. After all, we report on this technology pretty regularly both in this magazine and in our daily newsletter, Digital Transactions News. We do so because it seems likely that, sooner or later, most if not all digital payments will initiate from …
• 1 October

  So, Where Are We With Bitcoin?

  

  If you get rich betting on a certain currency, does that make that currency real? Or must people and businesses agree to accept it as payment for goods and services? If these are the criteria for establishing whether Bitcoin is “real” or not, the 8-year-old cryptocurrency has passed the first …

September, 2017

• 1 September

  Let the Flowers Bloom

  

  No sooner did the Faster Payments Task Force release its final report in July than it was met with criticism that neither the Task Force nor the Federal Reserve was mandating the report’s 2020 deadline for real-time or near real-time payments. Instead, the 300-plus payments executives who had worked on …

August, 2017

• 1 August

  It’s August. Here’s Why It Is Time for the Annual Buyers’ Guide

  How often do you pause to reflect on the pace of change in the electronic-payments business? Yes, we’re all quite busy, so such moments are rare. But they are instructive. A couple of decades ago, the notion of paying merchants with a debit card linked to a checking account and …