Law and Regulation

The political battle over the Credit Card Competition Act has heated up as the Small Business Payments Alliance (SBPA), a recently formed merchant trade group, has come out in opposition to the proposed legislation. The group argues that, if passed, the CCCA would harm small businesses. The SBPA, which held …

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau late Tuesday said it is expanding its efforts to increase oversight of large, non-bank technology firms with a proposed rule that would subject companies that issue digital wallets to the same regulations as those that cover wallets from financial institutions. The proposed rule, which would …

The Federal Trade Commission and the state of Florida reached a settlement with Chargebacks911 in a lawsuit they filed in April alleging the company and its owners use multiple unfair techniques to prevent consumers from winning chargeback disputes. The settlement would prohibit them from providing chargeback mitigation services to high-risk clients that use affiliate …

More than 10 years after Visa Inc. wrote its rules permitting surcharging on its credit cards, questions remain among acquirers, especially those selling or considering surcharge programs for their merchants. Now, as more merchants mull surcharge or cash-discount programs to alleviate some of their card-acceptance costs, and with recent changes …

According to recent research, American households carried a whopping $17.1 trillion in total debt as of the second quarter of 2023. The herculean effort to become debt-free continues to weigh on the shoulders of millions of Americans. We’ve seen the landscape of the U.S. workforce change drastically over the past …

The big processor Nuvei Corp. extended its reach into open banking Thursday through an agreement with American Express Co. to sell AmEx’s Pay with Bank transfer open-banking solution. Pay with Bank transfer (PwBt) enables consumers to pay for purchases directly from their bank account online or in-store. The partnership comes …

The big Montreal-based payments processor Nuvei Corp. said early Wednesday it will process investments in private companies through KoreConX, a technology provider specializing in enabling such payments for individual investors. Interestingly, the arrangement includes the use of both card and account-to-account networks to route customers’ investments, with a $50 minimum, …

Observers of the payments industry who wonder how the Federal Reserve’s proposed rate reductions for debit card acceptance might be received by the nation’s biggest processors heard an unequivocal answer early Tuesday from at least one of them.  “Any time the cost of acceptance goes down, it’s a positive for …

Last year, credit card issuers charged consumers more than $105 billion in interest and more than $25 billion in fees, $14.5 billion of which came from late fees, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s biennial credit card market report. Credit card holders paid about 20% of their average balance …

The Federal Reserve Board’s proposal Wednesday to make a 31% reduction in the main component of its debit card interchange ceiling for large issuers touches on a longstanding sore point among merchants and has already sparked a spirited debate in the payments industry. Merchant groups, long riled by debit card …