Debit Cards

By John Stewart@DTPaymentNews PayPal Holdings Inc. on Tuesday cranked up the heat on a person-to-person payments market that’s already close to full boil. In a blog post on PayPal’s site, PayPal chief operating officer Bill Ready announced the company has started testing instant transfers from users’ PayPal wallets to their …

By Peter Lucas @DTPaymentNews With the launch of its Prime Reload rewards service, Amazon.com Inc. has positioned itself to deal a serious blow to bank card issuers’ revenues earned from interchange on Amazon.com purchases, and limit the visibility banks have into their cardholders’ behavior on the e-commerce giant’s Web site. …

• Amazon.com Inc. introduced Prime Reload, a service that lets Amazon Prime members earn a 2% reward when they reload their Amazon Gift Card balance with a debit card. The reward is added to the gift card balance. Users must give Amazon their debit card, bank-account, and bank-routing numbers when they …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews The Republican lawmakers who pushed a bill through the House of Representatives last week to radically reform the Dodd-Frank Act did so after abandoning a provision that would have repealed the Act’s Durbin Amendment. But they made it clear in floor debate on Thursday that they …

• While House Republicans have stripped from the Financial Choice Act a provision that would have repealed the Durbin Amendment, the effort to get rid of the law’s debit-interchange caps and routing rules is still alive. As the House voted to pass the Act, a trio of Congressmen spoke in the House on Thursday …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews The U.S. transition to the EMV chip card standard has been a long and troubled road, but statistics released by the international standards body behind EMV indicate encouraging progress. As of the end of 2016, 52.2% of major-brand payment cards in the United States—some 675 million …

The Android Pay mobile-payments service from Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit is now live or about to go live in Canada, payments companies and media outlets reported Wednesday. Canada’s Interac Association national debit network said that its Interac Debit service will be available for Android Pay mobile payments beginning June 5 …

Global shipments of chip cards surpassed 2.1 billion in 2016, a 4% increase from 2015, says the Smart Payment Association. “Following significant EMV rollout programs in the United States and China, 2016 saw shipment volumes begin to normalize to reflect growing market maturity in most major global markets,” said Sylvie …

The decision to strip repeal of the Durbin Amendment from a Dodd-Frank overhaul bill puts a brake on the movement to get rid of the amendment’s debit card rules, but that may not necessarily be the end of the matter. Leading advocates for repeal vow to keep fighting, while a …

Two major retailer trade groups late Wednesday celebrated an apparent decision by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to quash a provision that would have repealed the Durbin Amendment. The provision was part of the Financial Choice Act, a bill Congressional Republicans are pushing to overhaul the 2010 Dodd-Frank …