Law and Regulation

Payments and other financial-services executives have long complained about what they call patent trolls, typically individuals who gain a patent on what some regard as a longstanding business method and then sue practitioners for infringement. In some instances, these cases have succeeded in wringing large settlements out of banks and …

By Digital Transactions News Staff The big SIM and EMV chip manufacturer Gemalto NV on Wednesday acknowledged that an alleged operation by U.S. and British electronic spy agencies targeting the company “probably happened,” but the Amsterdam-based firm downplayed its impact. The alleged operation in 2010 and 2011 by the United …

By Jim Daly and John Stewart Continuing its recent string of setbacks, American Express Co. Thursday lost a crucial federal court fight in which it defended policies banning merchants from steering AmEx cardholders to cheaper forms of payment. The U.S. Department of Justice and 17 state attorneys general challenged the …

By Jim Daly The U.S. Department of Justice and a merchant group focused on payment card acceptance costs Thursday afternoon hailed a federal district judge’s ruling striking down American Express Co.’s rules banning its merchants from steering AmEx cardholders to lower-cost forms of payment. Earlier in the day, New York …

By Jim Daly In the opinion of Visa Inc.’s lawyers, the Pulse PIN-debit network’s antitrust suit against the leading payment card network shouldn’t even have a pulse because Pulse hasn’t shown it has been harmed. Meanwhile, Google Inc. and a number of merchants that individually sued Visa and MasterCard Inc. …

CoinTerra Inc., an Austin, Texas-based Bitcoin mining and services company, filed for Chapter 7 liquidation late last month, just weeks after one of its key vendors filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against CoinTerra seeking $5.4 million. CoinTerra’s bankruptcy petition filed Jan. 24 estimates the company’s creditors range in number from 222 …

In the wake of an important Supreme Court decision early last week, Visa Inc.’s chief executive Thursday afternoon sounded a conciliatory note on the company’s often fraught relations with merchants and touted Visa’s digital-payments initiatives as a way of bringing more value to retailers in return for the fees they …

In a blueprint released Monday for a faster and more secure U.S. payments system, the Federal Reserve called for industry task forces to form early this year and for a “framework” to emerge by 2016 to set rules for near real-time payments. The banking regulator also set out five broad, …

The private sector often lives in fear of government regulation, but the payment card industry’s indigenous regulators are piling on new disclosure, monitoring and security requirements for merchant acquirers, panelists said Wednesday at the Northeast Acquirers Association (NEAA) annual conference in Boston. While many of the new rules are meant …

The U.S. Supreme Court may have rebuffed merchants seeking to cut debit card transaction costs, but that doesn’t mean they’re entirely out of options. On Thursday, the Merchant Advisory Group, a Minneapolis-based trade group that counts big-box stores and airlines among its 175 members, released a 16-page white paper using …