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The chief executive officer of Discover Financial Services isn’t too pleased with what Visa Inc. is doing to retain its lead in the debit marketplace now that the Durbin Amendment’s transaction-routing provisions are in place. Discover owns the Houston-based Pulse network, which like other electronic funds transfer networks stands to …
Read More »Check 21 Saved U.S. Payments System $3 Billion-Plus in 2010, Fed Paper Estimates
Check 21 saved the U.S. payments system more than $3 billion in 2010 as paper check clearing gave way almost entirely to image clearing, according to a paper released recently by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The paper sets out what is believed to be the first effort at …
Read More »Jury Nails VeriFone in Software Patent Case But Clears Rival Ingenico
A little software company gone bust won big against leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. in a patent-infringement verdict June 8. A federal jury in Texas found after a five-day trial that VeriFone infringed on two patents held by CardSoft Inc. and awarded damages and royalties of $15.4 million. …
Read More »Card-Not-Present Processor Litle Reports Durbin Has Cut Debit Interchange in Half
Online merchants and other card-not-present retailers that have so-called interchange-plus agreements with their acquirers are enjoying significantly lower transaction costs thanks to the Durbin Amendment, if research from processor Litle & Co. posted on Wednesday is any indication. Litle’s numbers indicate its client merchants have seen interchange costs cut in …
Read More »Dodd-Frank’s Consumer Bureau Starts to Mull Regulations for Prepaid Cards
The federal government’s new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fixed general-purpose reloadable prepaid cards in its regulatory sights Wednesday with a notice of proposed rulemaking and a public hearing in Durham, N.C., where its senior officials heard both praise for and condemnations of the cards. The CFPB said it would examine …
Read More »Durbin Supports Retailers Seeking Revamped Debit Regulations
U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, author of the now-famous amendment bearing his name that upended the debit card industry, made a figurative trip to court this week to show his support for retailers challenging the Federal Reserve Board’s final rule implementing his provision in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. In a friend of …
Read More »Interlink Takes a Hit While Antitrust Officials Investigate Visa
Visa Inc.’s pricing plans for merchant acquirers in the wake of the Durbin Amendment have generated controversy in the acquiring industry, and now they’re attracting scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice, the leading payment card network disclosed on Wednesday. Visa said in a regulatory filing that the DoJ’s Antitrust …
Read More »New Fed Data Give a Glimpse of the Durbin Amendment’s Early Effects
The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday released data about banks’ debit card interchange income now that the Durbin Amendment is in effect. Not surprisingly, the numbers show that interchange for regulated card issuers plunged. The nation’s leading retailer trade group took the occasion to decry the Fed, even though merchants …
Read More »Georgia Breaks Legal Ground With New Charter for Specialty Acquiring Banks
A little-noticed new Georgia law creates a new type of bank dedicated solely to merchant acquiring that could radically transform how the acquiring business works in the U.S. Enacted at the behest of Global Payments Inc., the big Atlanta-based merchant processor, the law enables a non-bank acquirer to own its …
Read More »A Battered Acquiring Industry Seeks New Political Survival Strategies
In the wake of the Durbin Amendment’s debit card price controls taking effect last fall and other new regulations, the payments industry is feeling politically battered and bruised and fearing that more fights with merchants are on the way. “Our era of self-regulation of pricing has ended,” Mary Weaver Bennett, …
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