With its Monday decision upholding American Express Co.’s anti-steering rules, the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed a tide of press speculation about just how payment card pricing, rewards, and network rules will be affected. At this point, however, only a few things are clear. The first is that AmEx chief executive …
Read More »A Safe Harbor Rejection Won’t Raise Risks for Banks Looking to Serve Cannabis Merchants
Financial institutions providing banking services to cannabis businesses in states where marijuana has been legalized are no more at risk of being punished by federal regulators than they were before Congress last week rejected legislation to provide them safe harbor. Legislators in the House of Representatives and the Senate separately …
Read More »A Divided Supreme Court Upholds AmEx’s Anti-Steering Rules
In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that American Express Co.’s anti-steering rules for merchants do not violate federal antitrust law. The conservative majority’s decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, caps a case that dates back to 2010 and involves merchants who wanted to steer merchants to …
Read More »USAA Sues Wells Fargo Over Remote Deposit Capture Patents
USAA, the big insurance company and bank serving current and former military members and their families, filed a federal lawsuit Thursday accusing Wells Fargo Bank of infringing on four of its mobile remote deposit capture patents. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, asks for unspecified damages. …
Read More »New Harbortouch POS Device Debuts and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 6/4/18
Harbortouch, a unit of Shift4 Payments, debuted Checkout, a point-of-sale system with features to aid retailers, including inventory tracking and management, time-clock and scheduling tools, and text and email marketing. Checkout is aimed at independent and small-chain retail stores, the company said. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating alleged insider …
Read More »Heartland Accuses Former CEO Carr of Giving Girlfriend Money for Improper Stock Purchase; Carr Calls It a ‘Smear Campaign’
Heartland Payment Systems, now a subsidiary of merchant acquirer Global Payments Inc., filed a lawsuit this week accusing its former chief executive Robert O. Carr of breach of fiduciary duty by giving a woman described as his girlfriend approximately $1 million to buy Heartland stock before Global Payments’s offer to …
Read More »Delaware Moves to Wider Sports Betting As States Look to Exercise Newly Granted Discretion
Delaware will begin allowing single-game sports betting at three casinos starting June 5, the state announced on Thursday. The move makes Delaware only the second state to allow single-game bets and represents the latest result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last month to strike down a 26-year-old law that …
Read More »COMMENTARY: In the Eyes of the CFPB, We Are All Prepaid Now
A deep dive into the more than 2,000 pages of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s regulations covering the prepaid market shows that the CFPB is trying to extend uniform consumer protections to as many payment types as possible. That includes unauthorized or disputed transactions for all financial-access devices regardless of …
Read More »Chase Sues Restaurant Operator Landry’s To Recover $20 Million in Data-Breach Network Fines
JPMorgan Chase Bank and its merchant-acquiring affiliate Paymentech have filed a breach-of-contract suit against restaurant operator and Paymentech merchant Landry’s Inc. seeking to recover $20 million in fines from Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. stemming from a 2014-15 data breach at dozens of Landry’s properties. The bank and processor, collectively called …
Read More »With Synthetic ID Fraud Losses Soaring, Complications Beset a Search for Solutions
Cyberthieves can use the payment credentials they steal to charge products to the people who are the legitimate owners of that data. That’s bad enough. But increasingly, these fraudsters are using the information they glean from data breaches to invent fresh identities, sometimes out of whole cloth, leaving credit card …
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