Law and Regulation

In the wake of an important Supreme Court decision early last week, Visa Inc.’s chief executive Thursday afternoon sounded a conciliatory note on the company’s often fraught relations with merchants and touted Visa’s digital-payments initiatives as a way of bringing more value to retailers in return for the fees they …

In a blueprint released Monday for a faster and more secure U.S. payments system, the Federal Reserve called for industry task forces to form early this year and for a “framework” to emerge by 2016 to set rules for near real-time payments. The banking regulator also set out five broad, …

The private sector often lives in fear of government regulation, but the payment card industry’s indigenous regulators are piling on new disclosure, monitoring and security requirements for merchant acquirers, panelists said Wednesday at the Northeast Acquirers Association (NEAA) annual conference in Boston. While many of the new rules are meant …

The U.S. Supreme Court may have rebuffed merchants seeking to cut debit card transaction costs, but that doesn’t mean they’re entirely out of options. On Thursday, the Merchant Advisory Group, a Minneapolis-based trade group that counts big-box stores and airlines among its 175 members, released a 16-page white paper using …

Merchants battling debit card pricing and routing rules suffered another defeat on Tuesday. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition from a merchant group seeking to have the high court hear its arguments against Federal Reserve rules regulating debit card interchange and transaction routing. The move leaves intact a lower-court …

In the wake of a barrage of data thefts affecting tens of millions of U.S. citizens, President Barack Obama on Monday proposed national legislation to regulate breach notification. Other legislation proposed by Obama would ban companies from selling student data to other organizations for non-educational uses and from using information …

The number of credit and debit cards compromised in data breaches hit 64.4 million in 2014, up 38% from 46.6 million in 2013, according to preliminary figures from the Identity Theft Resource Center, a San Diego-based non-profit that tracks breaches. Some 133 of 2014’s breaches involved payment cards, up 39% …

Breach-notification laws, misbehaving merchants, and online sales tax legislation are just three potential hotspots for legislation and regulation in 2015, advise payments industry attorneys. Long a wish-list item for many, a uniform, national breach-notification law could see enactment in 2015, thanks —unfortunately—to the flurry of large-and small-scale payment card data …

  Consumer behavior poses just as much of a threat to the proper use of passwords as do the actions of criminals intent on cracking those passwords. That’s the assessment of a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based consulting firm. The “In Search Of A Better …

  The Merchant Financial Cyber Partnership, a unique coalition of eight financial-services trade associations and 11 merchant groups, wants Congress to make it easier for retailers and financial institutions to share information with each other related to data breaches. Merchants and financial-services companies often are bitter foes when it comes …