As one who has spent an entire career working with community banks, credit unions, and merchants, I can say it’s abundantly clear how they all suffer from a broken payments system, with the Fed’s automated clearing house being the lone exception. While merchants and community banks don’t share the same …

There are few subjects that raise the ire of merchants more than the runaway costs of card acceptance. For years, many have grumbled about the costs but felt powerless to do anything about them. Now, as the result of a chain of court victories at the state and federal level, …

From a merchant perspective, one of the most harmful features of today’s card networks is default pricing. One merchant advocate succinctly described the anti-competitive impact of default pricing, stating, “with default pricing, banks have no incentive to compete for merchants’ business.”  Today, individual merchants are forced to face off against …

The chief executives of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover last month came together to start the Payments Leadership Council, a group that also includes the heads of FIS, Fiserv, and Global Payments. Thus, we now have witnessed the final step by adding the keystone to the pyramid of power …

Standards are the prerogative of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for most industries around the world. According to ISO, “ISO standards are internationally agreed by experts” and “should be thought of as a formula that describes the best way of doing something.”  Unfortunately, the roles of ISO and its …

Unlike Visa and Mastercard, Plaid is not just another credit and debit card company largely beholden to the big banks. It uses modern technology, in a sector that has been slow to adopt it, to create a new payments paradigm. It likely has no plans to issue cards or use …

Finally! No doubt, merchants throughout the country are applauding the Justice Department’s suit against Visa to stop its planned acquisition of Plaid, a potential competitor. For far too long, we’ve witnessed the growth of Visa’s dominance of the debit card business, which has come at a huge cost to America’s …

A recent Forbes article attempted to refute many of the conclusions of a prior Wall Street Journal article that had illustrated how the card schemes (Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc.) have dramatically increased their fees in recent years. In response, the Forbes article challenged the Journal article by completely changing …

Merchants have come a long way since the inception of the Merchant Advisory Group, but far more needs to be done to restore some semblance of balance in payments. Upon reflection, it is remarkable that traditional merchants had no formal means to get together to discuss payments until the MAG …

The same U.S. banks that have retarded progress in digital payments shouldn’t be entrusted with anything approaching a monopoly on implementing real-time payments systems, says Mark Horwedel. Lately, the Federal Reserve Board has been shepherding a cross-industry effort to build a faster, more efficient, and more secure payments system in …