By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews No bones about it, adding EMV payment card acceptance to point-of-sale systems has been a challenge for retailers. Seventy-six percent of them, in the inaugural “State of Retail Payments 2016” study, said EMV implementation was their top challenge in the past 12 months. Other top challenges from …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews The debate over the price merchants pay to accept credit cards may be about to intensify. A new report suggests that capping credit card interchange at 22 cents plus 30.5 basis points per transaction could cut $15 billion from the current total of $33 billion U.S. merchants …

• A variety of financial-services firms, including MasterCard Inc., SWIFT, and Visa Inc., participated in a 130-page report released Friday by the World Economic Forum that concludes “distributed-ledger technology will form the foundation of next-generation financial services infrastructure in conjunction with other existing and emerging technologies.” • M&T Bank announced …

By John Stewart@DTPaymentNews The U.S. EMV transition that began in earnest last October has brought with it a lot of pain, but few issues have been more agonizing for merchants than the flood of chargebacks they’re seeing for the first time. Now estimates are emerging that begin to quantify that …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Visa Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. say there is no news in their standoff that began July 18 with Wal-Mart kicking Visa out of its three stores in Thunder Bay, Ontario. But Visa over the past several weeks has run a marketing campaign to remind residents of …

• With sales of EMV payment cards to U.S. credit and debit card issuers down 55% year over year in the second quarter, card producer CPI Card Group Inc. reported that total sales fell 23% to $73.7 million. Due in part to litigation expenses, CPI booked a net loss from …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Mobile-wallet adoption might get a boost through the rest of 2016 as 29% of consumers expect to use a mobile wallet like Apple Pay, Android Pay, or Samsung Pay before the end of the year, finds a survey from Computer Services Inc., a financial-technology company. Most—71%—had no …

• A status conference in the massive credit card interchange case known as MDL 1720 is set for Thursday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the wake of the $5.7 billion settlement in the case being overturned by an appellate court June 30. The case is returning to …

• The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and its Michigan State Disbursement unit are allowing parents who choose a cash option online for child-support payments to make the payments at 7-Eleven and Family Dollar stores, with processing handled by PayNearMe. The arrangement follows a similar venture in which PayNearMe …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Partly because of a big increase in skimming, debit card fraud rates jumped in 2015 on both signature and PIN-based point-of-sale transactions, according to the 2016 Debit Issuer Study commissioned by Discover Financial Services’ Pulse electronic funds transfer network. The overall fraud-loss rate on PIN POS transactions …