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The three-legged stool of merchants, payments companies, and consumers necessary to enable EMV chip card acceptance may be a little wobbly in the early going if the results of a new consumer survey are any indication. Fifty-nine percent of consumers say they are not ready for EMV, finds a survey …
Read More »As Criminals Redouble Their Efforts, Merchants Sustain an Eye-Popping Jump in Fraud
Merchants contend with fraud all the time, but the 2015 edition of the LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud study has found that their fraud costs are tallying 1.32% of revenue in 2015, a whopping 94% increase from the 0.68% rate in 2014. All categories of merchants in the LexisNexis Risk …
Read More »Only 27% of Merchants Are EMV Ready, but a Surge May Be Coming
Expectations of easily getting merchants ready to accept EMV credit and debit cards appear to be misaligned with the reality of the terminalization program. That’s one finding from a survey released Thursday by The Strawhecker Group, an Omaha, Neb.-based payments consultancy. To accept EMV chip cards, merchants must have compatible …
Read More »Card Aggregator Stratos Enlists Eastern Bank in Test
Stratos Inc., developer of the Stratos card that consolidates multiple credit and debit cards into one device consumers carry in their wallets, says Boston-based Eastern Bank will test its partner program. Card aggregators, like Stratos, operate on the premise that U.S. consumers want an easier way to manage all of …
Read More »Consumers Know EMV Is Coming, They’re Just Not Sure What It’s All About
By Kevin Woodward Consumers know their credit and debit cards are changing, they’re just not sure exactly what is happening. That’s one of the findings from a survey released by payments provider Harbortouch. In the survey of 18,000 U.S. consumers, 89.4% said they were aware of the transition from magnetic …
Read More »America: Visa’s Unlikely EMV Leader
Americans like to say their country is No. 1. Now, according to Visa Inc., America is No. 1 in a most unlikely category: EMV chip cards. According to figures Visa released Tuesday, some 141.9 million EMV credit and debit Visa cards were in issue in the U.S. as of August, …
Read More »AmEx’s Deal With Sam’s Club Will Only Partially Fill the Costco Hole
American Express Co. soon will be accepted at Sam’s Club, the membership-club division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The new deal will open more than 650 warehouse stores with thousands of big-spending customers to AmEx, but it still will fall short of filling the big hole that the warehouse-club sector’s biggest …
Read More »Card Manufacturer’s IPO Filing Opens a Window Into the U.S. EMV Conversion
The conversion of U.S. general-purpose payment cards to the EMV chip card standard is providing windfalls for all sorts of card-industry vendors. A new example comes from the big plastic card manufacturer CPI Card Group Inc., which has filed for a possible initial public offering of stock. EMV cards accounted …
Read More »Visa’s Latest EMV Snapshot: 127 Million Chip Cards, 295,000 EMV-Accepting Locations
By Jim Daly With the much-heralded EMV liability shift now less than a month away, the United States could be likened to briskly walking, though hardly running, toward the finish line of full-fledged chip card payments. New figures provided by Visa Inc. to Digital Transactions News on Friday show that …
Read More »Growing Mobile Use Among Consumers Is Attracting More Criminals, Says New Report
Growing consumer use of mobile devices like smart phones is making the devices more attractive to criminals trying to capture payments data. That’s the assessment from ThreatMetrix Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based data-security company, in its “Cybercrime Report: Q2 2015” report, which analyzed more than 75 million attacks that were …
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