Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
The Coin card, which officially launched last Thursday but is not yet available in the market, is generating a tidal wave of buzz in the press and on social-media sites but is not wowing payments experts contacted by Digital Transactions News. “It’s solving a problem that doesn’t really exist,” says …
Read More »Visa, MasterCard Post Big Volume Gains As They Fight for Credit, Debit Card Spend
U.S. bank card purchase volumes rose in the 10% range in the quarter ending Sept. 30, with MasterCard Inc. growing faster than Visa Inc. in debit and Visa gaining faster than MasterCard in credit. MasterCard on Thursday reported total U.S. credit, charge, and debit card purchase volume of $267 billion, …
Read More »Network Divide Over EMV Comes to the Fore as Rumors About a Liability-Shift Delay Surface
By Jim Daly The deep divide within debit networks about bringing Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards to the United States was on full display Monday at a conference in which a Visa Inc. executive hinted that Visa might be open to a delay in a major EMV deadline. But an executive …
Read More »Square Gets Into the Person-to-Person Payments Arena With its New Square Cash
By Jim Daly In a move that apparently signals its intention to become a more diversified financial-services provider, Square Inc. on Tuesday introduced a person-to-person payments service called Square Cash. The service, which works through email or mobile apps, has no fees for either the sender or recipient and only …
Read More »Dueling Studies Reach Opposite Conclusions About Consumers’ Durbin Savings
Durbin Amendment critics have long accused merchants of pocketing the billions they’ve saved since the amendment’s highly controversial debit card interchange price controls took effect two years ago Tuesday. Now, however, retailers are rolling out a study estimating that merchants passed on $5.86 billion in Durbin-related savings to consumers last …
Read More »Survey Finds ATM and Most Other Checking Fees Growing Only Modestly in 2013
The average ATM surcharge rose 4% over the last year, but the average foreign fee fell 2.5%, according to new data from research firm Bankrate Inc. Findings from Bankrate’s latest annual survey of checking-account fees, including ATM and overdraft charges, shows overall price increases have slowed, a possible indication that …
Read More »Insurer’s Efforts To Dodge Data-Theft Claims Highlight Growing Field of Breach Insurance
Schnuck Markets Inc. found itself in a bit of a pickle recently when it learned that its insurance company is refusing to cover losses from a data breach at the regional grocery store chain that compromised up to 2.4 million debit and credit cards. The Schnucks incident and other recent …
Read More »Free Checking Remains Commonplace, But Not Quite As Common As in the Past
By Jim Daly Plenty of Americans are still getting free checking, but not as many as last year, according to new findings from the American Bankers Association. The Washington, D.C.-based trade group’s latest annual consumer survey says 55% of bank customers spend nothing each month for banking services and ATM …
Read More »Forgotten Fed Report Shows Debit Interchange Could Be in for a Real Haircut
Findings from an overlooked Federal Reserve Board report from last March portend that the possible cuts in debit card interchange as a result of a major court decision last month could be even bigger than many observers initially thought. In the report, the Fed said that authorization, clearing, and settlement …
Read More »The Fed Will Appeal Judge’s Decision To Overturn Its Durbin-Amendment Rule
By Jim Daly The Federal Reserve on Wednesday said it would appeal the July 31 decision by a federal judge overturning the board’s rule implementing the Durbin Amendment, the section of 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act that regulates debit cards. The news came from Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, at a …
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