Debit Cards

While much of the corporate world has high hopes for a business-friendly bent from the Trump Administration, two policy analysts on Wednesday poured cold water on some of the payments industry’s fondest hopes for regulatory relief. One such hope, to scrap a 1,689-page rule regulating prepaid cards, was sinking fast …

Call centers remain a prime target for criminals looking to perpetrate fraud. In 2016, call-center fraud jumped 113% from 2015, according to Atlanta-based Pindrop Labs’ annual Call Center Fraud Report. Fraudulent activity took place with one in every 937 call-center calls, compared to one in 2,000 calls in 2015“With tools …

Mastercard Inc. reported Tuesday that it switched nearly 17% more transactions in the first quarter than it did a year earlier. Most of the growth came from overseas, but some of it resulted from more U.S. PIN-debit volume, company executives said. Purchase, N.Y.-based Mastercard said it switched 14.7 billion transactions …

• Opponents and proponents of repealing debit card interchange controls known as the Durbin Amendment prepared for a hearing on the Financial CHOICE Act Thursday with dueling press releases. The National Retail Federation, as reported earlier this week by Digital Transactions News, led a meeting of retailers interested in keeping the …

Data breaches are in the news constantly, but they appear to have no long-term effect on consumers’ use of payment methods. Breaches might, however, spur some consumers to switch hospitals, according to researchers. “Payment attitudes and payment behaviors are very, very sticky,” says Claire Greene, a payments analyst at the …

Retailers organized by the National Retail Federation and the Merchants Payments Coalition are scheduled to descend on Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to urge Congress to preserve the Durbin Amendment within the ever-controversial Dodd-Frank Act. One close observer of the political and banking scenes, however, believes the amendment will survive despite …

The seemingly plodding U.S. migration to the EMV chip card standard may not be so plodding after all. Visa Inc., in data released Friday, says consumers made 1 billion Visa chip card transactions in March, a tripling of the 303.3 million in March 2016. The number of transactions has steadily …

Boosted by the addition of two big U.S. credit card programs and its June 2016 acquisition of Visa Europe, just about every operational metric that matters increased by 20% or more for Visa Inc. in the quarter ending March 31. The major exception was U.S. debit, which grew in only …

Electronic-payments industry efforts to promote card use may be paying off. Significantly more consumers are using credit cards for low-value purchases of $5 or less than they did in 2016. A CreditCards.com survey released Monday found that 17% of consumers typically used their credit cards for these in-store transactions compared …

A survey of 500 small merchants that accept debit cards finds that 66% of them are satisfied with the fees they pay, says the Electronic Payments Coalition, a bank and network advocacy organization. Javelin Strategy & Research completed the survey, which the EPC sponsored. The findings are part of the …