February, 2020

• 1 February

  Behind Visa’s $5.3 Billion Bet on Plaid

  

  Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. have made it plain in recent years they’re interested in something much bigger than card payments. A few weeks ago, Visa underscored its own determination to be the network for the world’s payments economy by announcing it will lay out fully $5.3 billion to buy …

January, 2020

• 1 January

  Payments 3.0: We Are All Prepaid Now

  

  A fight is brewing over the future of mobile wallets. On one side is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which believes that the heart of every mobile wallet is a prepaid card. On the other is PayPal, which believes that mobile wallets are so different that they should not be …
• 1 January

  Security Notes: It’s Time For Civic Currency

  

  The steam engine, the telephone, and the Internet are all innovations that gestated for a long time before realizing their eventual impact. Digital currency appears to be joining this list. Much as the telephone was more than a “Yankee replacement to errand boys,” in the words of a dismissive British …
• 1 January

  Visa’s Cross-Border Gambits

  

  Visa Inc. is working fast to expand its foothold in cross-border remittances, a relatively new market for the card network. Last month, MoneyGram International Inc. announced it is the first remittance service to allow international transfers that rely on Visa Direct, a push-payment service that enables real-time transfers to holders …

December, 2019

• 1 December

  Payments 3.0: Get Ready for ‘Walmartcoin’

  

  While Facebook has gotten the lion’s share of attention for its attempt to launch a digital currency, the real future of digital-currency payments may lie with the nation’s largest retailer, Walmart Inc. Walmart, based in Bentonville, Ark., filed a patent application on Aug. 1 for a “system and method for …
• 1 December

  Security Notes: It’s Time For Bionic ID

  

  More and more people are identifying themselves online through their unique biometric data. The method is robust in so far as the original biological data is in analog format, which means one decides how many digital bits to use to represent that data. The bit-flow of the reading may be …
• 1 December

  Big Retailers Line up Behind FedNow

  

  A retail trade association as well as Target Corp. in recent weeks have endorsed the Federal Reserve’s planned FedNow real-time gross settlement service. In a letter posted last month on the official FedNow comment site, the Washington, D.C.-based Retail Industry Leaders Association said “over the past decades RILA has seen …
• 1 December

  Is Bill Pay Next for Google Pay?

  

  Google Inc. is making a play for the heart of payments—the checking account—and some observers see the strategy’s first fruit as likely to be a move into a massive market long controlled by banks and service providers. “It’s huge,” Krista Tedder, director of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, says …

November, 2019

• 1 November

  Security Notes: The Age of Insecurity

  

  There are hundreds of cybersecurity companies offering products designed to protect us from identity theft by requiring us to prove our identity through biometrics and unscripted behavior. These products claim efficacy against today’s threats. Many of them even grow and prosper as they defeat a great deal of contemporary fraud. …
• 1 November

  An ISO’s $135-Million Win Against Global Payments

  

  Global Payments Inc. may be on the hook for more than $135 million following a jury verdict in a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed by an independent sales organization against the Atlanta-based processor. A jury in the Superior Court of DeKalb County in Georgia found that Global Payments breached parts of its …