Law and Regulation

The Federal Reserve’s proposed FedNow real-time payments service won’t be live for more than three years, but bankers and other interested parties peppered two Fed officials with plenty of questions about it Monday. The occasion was a 90-minute webinar in which the officials reviewed the ambitious FedNow plans unveiled last …

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Task Force on Financial Technology will hold a hearing Sept. 26 on “The Future of Real-Time Payments.” The task force was created in May by U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee.Housecall Pro, a software platform for home-service technicians, launched My …

The card networks’ crackdown on negative-option billing and subscriptions with free trials is continuing, with stricter policies from Visa Inc. set to take effect April 18. The updated Visa rules will follow by a year tightened rules from Mastercard Inc. on negative-option billers. These are billers who, after getting a consumer …

The imminent arrival of the NFL season, coupled with a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that leaves legalized sports betting up to the states, could sack payments firms’ efforts to control fraud, observers warn. The professional football season kicks off Sept. 5 and is widely expected to draw strong …

(This story has been updated to include a statement from Square). Square Inc. is often seen as the exemplar of technology that lets small merchants process card transactions via a simple reader linked to a mobile device. But now a rival point-of-sale technology provider has sued Square alleging that the …

Several backers of Facebook Inc.’s proposed Libra cryptocurrency are having second thoughts because of regulatory pushback, according to a British newspaper report. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission announced settlements Thursday with four defendants accused of falsely promising big returns to consumers who paid in cryptocurrencies to participate in an alleged …

Despite very few stores in Wisconsin refusing to accept cash payments, a member of the state Assembly recently introduced a bill that would require merchants to accept cash for face-to-face purchases, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. The bill would impose fines of $200 up to $5,000 for violations. Similar proposals have passed or are pending in …

The year 2019 is shaping up to be the worst year yet for data breaches, according to a recent report from Risk Based Security Inc. Through the year’s first half, 3,813 breaches were reported, up 54% from a year earlier. Those breaches exposed more than 4.1 billion consumer records, up …

More than a score of Texas cities have been hit with ransomware, crippling their municipal computer systems and accounting for one-third of all municipal ransomware attacks so far this year, according to Armor Defense Inc., a cloud-security company. It released a ransomware report Tuesday. Among the latest cities is Borger, …

From cities to stadiums to quick-service restaurants, more and more places are grappling with the idea of going 100% cashless. According to the Pew Research Center, almost a third of Americans have stopped using cash for their typical weekly spending. Even Monopoly, many children’s first interaction with money and the …