Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
One of the biggest changeovers in the history of general-purpose credit cards is set for this weekend when warehouse retailer Costco Wholesale Corp. stops accepting American Express Co. cards and begins taking Visa Inc. cards. In an email to its customer-members this week, Issaquah, Wash.-based Costco said to “mark your …
Read More »Bank Issues Card Intended for Use in Cuba and other Digital Transactions News briefs
• The Home Depot Inc. filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. for alleged lax security practices and a preference for higher-margin signature authentication with EMV chip credit cards over more secure PIN authentication, according to the Associated Press. A MasterCard spokesperson told the AP that …
Read More »Did a May Meeting With Durbin Staffers Prompt Visa to Back off on Its New Fee?
The payments industry may never know for sure what prompted Visa Inc. to back off on a potentially lucrative new fee aimed at issuers planning to defect to other networks. But a clue to the decision emerged Wednesday when U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin’s office issued a statement celebrating the move …
Read More »After Tussling With Visa, Durbin Challenges MasterCard Over an Issuer Fee
U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin on Thursday asked MasterCard Inc. to explain an obscure fee with a clunky name that the senator believes penalizes MasterCard issuers when merchants exercise their transaction-routing rights under the Durbin Amendment with MasterCard debit card purchases. But MasterCard says issuers benefit whenever its cards are used, …
Read More »How Account Takeovers Complicate the Battle to Control Fraud on Mobile Wallets
Issuers contending with payment card fraud will have to factor in mobile wallets, especially as the battle to thwart account takeovers intensifies. A majority of issuers—56%—said they cannot further reduce account takeovers without hurting the customer experience, according to a card-issuer fraud study released recently by LexisNexis Risk Solutions and …
Read More »Durbin’s Latest Salvo Challenges a New Visa Fee, But Visa Says It Has Dropped It
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the author of the fee-capping Durbin Amendment, is well-known as a champion of merchants, but now he’s taking up the cause of small banks and credit unions. Durbin on Tuesday sent a letter to Visa Inc. chief executive Charles Scharf asking for information about a new …
Read More »MasterCard Reports Growth in EMV Merchants, With a Decline in Counterfeit Fraud
Despite hiccups and hitches along the way, the conversion of the massive and highly fragmented U.S. payment card industry from magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards to ones bearing an EMV chip appears to be moving apace. The latest data from MasterCard Inc. finds the number of merchants accepting chip cards …
Read More »Banks Likely To Emulate Wells Fargo’s Pioneering Payment-Enabled Mobile Wallet
Wells Fargo Bank N.A.’s announcement Tuesday that it would launch a mobile wallet with payments capability built into the Android version of its banking app could be a win for the bank, and herald similar moves by other banks. That’s the assessment from Daniel Van Dyke, an analyst at Javelin …
Read More »Rewards Cards: Rewarding for Issuers, but What About Merchants?
Rewards and loyalty cards are now common in the U.S. payments landscape, but new research findings show just how popular such cards have become. A study by Phoenix Marketing International says 93% of all credit card spending is now done on rewards cards, up from 88% in 2013. A separate …
Read More »The Opposing Sides in Green Dot’s Acrimonious Proxy Fight Dole Out Voting Advice
The increasingly dramatic proxy fight at prepaid card issuer Green Dot Corp., a fight that could cost its founder, chairman, and chief executive Steven W. Streit his job if management loses, took an interesting turn Monday when Green Dot said it would appoint George Gresham, a director nominee from the …
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