The Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange price cap took effect six years ago this month, prompting a merchant group to celebrate the occasion and claim the measure has saved consumers and merchants $48 billion. But a lobbying group of payment networks and banks derided those savings estimates and once again …
Read More »FDIC May Have Been Hit With Up to 54 Data Breaches in the Past Two Years, Auditor Says
As the insurer for deposits at most of the nation’s banks, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. collects a large amount of personally identifying information on bank customers. As such, the FDIC is a target for hackers, who hit it with 54 suspected or confirmed data breaches discovered between Jan. 1, …
Read More »Tech Buzzwords Don’t Cut It as Skeptical Investors Assess Payment Startups
Moderating a panel of three investment executives who put money into startup payments firms and other financial-technology companies, Frank Young, senior vice president of innovation at merchant processor Global Payments Inc., noticed well into the Strategic Leadership Forum session Thursday that no one had mentioned artificial intelligence, machine learning, the …
Read More »What Might It Take for the EMV Holdouts To Join the Chip-Card Fold?
The number of U.S. merchants that accept EMV chip cards at the point of sale is increasing rapidly, according to recent figures from Visa Inc., but it’s going to take some work by merchant acquirers and payment card networks to convince the holdouts to convert. Executives from two of those …
Read More »Eye on Policy: Fintech Regulation, and ‘Taking Out the Trash’
What role government regulators should play as financial-technology companies increasingly challenge banks with new services for consumers and merchants is generating more debate in the electronic-payments industry. At a forum Tuesday, regulators said they want to encourage innovation while protecting consumers, but an executive with an online business lender argued …
Read More »After Three Quarters, Payments Stocks Continue to Reward Investors in 2017
Shares of payments companies outperformed the general stock-market indexes in September, and beat most of them in the third quarter and the year so far, investment firm Barrington Research reported Monday. A group of 29 payments stocks posted a mean return of 2.74% in September, its ninth straight month of …
Read More »EMV at Two: Consumers Still Think Purchases Are Too Slow; Many Merchants Indifferent
EMV chip card payments at the U.S. point of sale have been around, officially at least, for two years now, but consumers still perceive them as slow, and many merchants still don’t accept chip cards, according to a poll of consumers and retailers by merchant processor Cayan. The time to …
Read More »Faster Payments by 2020: Incredibly Unrealistic, Doable, or Both?
The Federal Reserve’s call for a faster-payments system to be in place in the United States by 2020 has been termed everything from a vision to a goal, a soft goal, or a deadline. One thing it isn’t is a mandate. So can faster payments arrive in less than two …
Read More »Operation Choke Point Officially Is Dead, but an ATM Trade Group Believes Its Ghost Lingers
It was just over a month ago that a ranking U.S. Department of Justice official told Congress that Operation Choke Point had ended. But the ATM Industry Association on Wednesday said it is distributing materials to its members to help them deal with the “lingering impact” of the controversial program. …
Read More »Look for the Faster-Payments Landscape To Come Into Sharper Focus in the Coming Months
There are still many unknowns, but siding and the roof are on order for the frame of the Federal Reserve’s faster-payments project. That’s the message conveyed Tuesday by Fed officials and payments-industry executives who participated in a years-long effort to speed up U.S. electronic payments as well as make them …
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