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A streamlined approval for contactless mobile-payment devices announced Wednesday by chip card standards body EMVCo could help mobile-payments boosters realize their elusive dream that the coming of chip cards to the U.S. also will lift smart-phone-based payments. The new approval process is meant to confirm that mobile devices enabled for …
Read More »A New Report Fires an Opening Salvo in Effort to Bring Durbin Cap to Credit Card Fees
By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews The debate over the price merchants pay to accept credit cards may be about to intensify. A new report suggests that capping credit card interchange at 22 cents plus 30.5 basis points per transaction could cut $15 billion from the current total of $33 billion U.S. merchants …
Read More »As Merchants Struggle With EMV, Their Chargeback Toll Will Hit $5.8 Billion in 2016
By John Stewart@DTPaymentNews The U.S. EMV transition that began in earnest last October has brought with it a lot of pain, but few issues have been more agonizing for merchants than the flood of chargebacks they’re seeing for the first time. Now estimates are emerging that begin to quantify that …
Read More »Retailers Urge House to Reconsider Bills That Would Repeal the Durbin Amendment
More than 120 retailers sent a letter Tuesday to the U.S. House of Representative’s Financial Services Committee urging the panel to reconsider two measures that would repeal the Durbin Amendment in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. The bills stand virtually no chance of becoming law while Barack Obama remains president, but with …
Read More »Durbin Spars With Visa And MasterCard
Depending on your point of view, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., became either a hero or a villain in the payments business back in 2010 with his Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act. Among other things, the amendment capped debit card interchange for large issuers, pleasing merchants and ruffling the feathers …
Read More »An Appeals Court’s Decision Puts Interchange in Play, With an Unpredictable Outcome
The sweeping 4-year-old settlement between card networks and banks on the one hand and merchants on the other, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned Thursday, covered a lot of ground. But the case the agreement grew out of had as its central focus credit card …
Read More »Uncertainty Shrouds Huge Interchange Settlement After Appellate Court’s Stunning Veto
A federal appeals court on Thursday threw out a massive agreement initially reached four years ago over card-network interchange and acceptance rules, drawing a sudden veil of uncertainty over crucial legal matters much of the payments industry had thought were all but settled. In a 41-page opinion studded with sometimes …
Read More »After Deciding “To Capitulate” to Visa, Kroger Sues the Network Over EMV Transaction Routing
The Kroger Co. on Monday sued Visa Inc. over the network’s alleged efforts to force the nation’s leading grocery-store chain to route EMV chip debit card transactions over Visa’s network by having customers sign for purchases rather than enter PINs. Kroger, the largest retailer after Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to …
Read More »The Stop-and-Start State of Virtual-Currency Regulation
Regulation of virtual currency at the state level is proving to be a stop-and-start affair. No other state has yet followed New York with its now famous “BitLicense” to regulate virtual currencies under existing law. But in North Carolina, a bill to update the state’s money-transmitter act could become …
Read More »Home Depot Antitrust Suit Challenges Networks over Chip Cards and Visa’s FANF
The Home Depot Inc.’s new lawsuit against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. makes many of the same antitrust allegations that other merchants have lodged against the big networks in recent years. The suit, however, is notable for asking the court to quash Visa’s Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF) and, like …
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