Americans and Australians are using ATMs less than they did two years ago, while British adults are the biggest and most frequent users of the machines that debuted 50 years ago in their country. But Americans are more willing than their English-speaking compatriots to pay ATM fees. Those are some …
Read More »Equifax Breach Comes As Merchants And Banks Struggle With Outsized Fraud
Last week’s disclosure that hackers had accessed up to 143 million credit records at Equifax Inc. has stirred fears of a tsunami of fraud in coming months. But physical and online merchants are already struggling not only with a huge threat of fraud, but with a stunning fraud cost that …
Read More »‘Not a Good Day’ at Equifax As Payment Implications Emerge from a Huge Data Hack
In the hours after credit-reporting giant Equifax Inc. disclosed a massive data breach, consumers and businesses were left scrambling Friday to piece together the implications. But a range of consequences could affect Equifax itself as the Atlanta-based company struggles to recover from an epic hack that affected potentially 143 million …
Read More »EMV-Accepting Merchant Locations Hit 2.3 Million in June, Visa Reports
The number of EMV chip card-accepting U.S. merchant locations reached 2.3 million in June, up from 2.02 million in March and an increase of 77% from 1.3 million in June 2016, according to new figures from Visa Inc. Visa says in its latest EMV report that half of U.S. storefronts now …
Read More »The CFPB Didn’t Play Nice, So a Judge Tosses Its Claims Against Merchant Acquirers
After chastising the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for way it handled itself in its 2015 lawsuit against allegedly fraudulent debt collectors and their payment processors, a federal judge on Friday threw out the CFPB’s claims against the processors. The case is unusual in that Judge Richard W. Story of U.S. …
Read More »AmEx Exits Prepaid Card Program Management With Platform Sale to InComm
The pending sale by American Express Co. of its Serve technology platform to prepaid card program manager InComm moves AmEx more toward the model used by most other general-purpose prepaid card issuers and still keeps the upscale AmEx brand involved in a business mostly oriented toward moderate- and lower-income consumers, …
Read More »Payments Firms Cancel Accounts for White Supremacist Groups After Charlottesville Violence
In the wake of violent clashes last weekend between white supremacist groups and counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., payments companies are cutting off access to their systems that supremacist groups use to accept donations. Pressure on the payments firms began building not long after a female counter-demonstrator was fatally struck by …
Read More »One Year Later, Grocer New Seasons Says Faster EMV Has Made Everybody Happy
It’s been a year since the so-called faster EMV burst on the scene at some grocery stores on the West Coast, and so far officials at the chain that owns the two store brands involved in that launch couldn’t be more pleased with how the technology has smoothed out EMV’s …
Read More »Last Year Saw Double-Digit Drops in Fraud Rates for Debit Issuers, Pulse Study Says
There’s some good news for U.S. debit card issuers in the form of reduced fraud rates, according to the 2017 Debit Issuer Study released Monday by Pulse, the electronic funds transfer network owned by Discover Financial Services. The fraud-loss rate for signature-debit transactions fell 30% from 2015’s 2.6 cents per …
Read More »The NRF Expects Eight in 10 Small Retailers To Have EMV Terminals by Year’s End
Smaller retailers haven’t yet closed the EMV-acceptance gap with big ones, but they are making progress on installing EMV chip card readers at the point of sale, according to findings from a recent survey for the National Retail Federation. The online poll found that 60% of small brick-and-mortar retailers had …
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