Pricing

The cost of check scanners is the biggest hurdle to small businesses' adoption of remote deposit capture, says a new report from Boston-based researcher Celent LLC. Yet only 15% of banks offer clients free scanners, with half requiring them to buy the machines upfront, either from the bank or from …

A bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives late last week that proposes to lay down new rules for how payment card interchange would be set raises many questions beyond whether the banking or retail lobby carries more clout in Congress. The questions can be summed up in one: …

With free card-swipe terminals having already captured the imagination of acquirers and merchants, the notion of free check scanners might not be far behind. Indeed, free equipment that reads magnetic-ink-character-recognition lines while capturing check images could be the key for banks to drive remote deposit capture adoption among small businesses, …

Counter-intuitive though it may be, independent sales organizations and merchant acquirers in general are seeing their spreads increase while simultaneously facing margin compression. The reason, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC assessing trends in the acquiring industry: acquirers are generating new revenues from their merchants outside of …

Apartments and other rental real estate such as vacation properties, one of the great remaining virgin markets for electronic payments, could get a boost in April when a new MasterCard Inc. interchange incentive takes effect that will lower card-acceptance costs for property managers. MasterCard's program is intended to direct more …

Locked in increasingly fierce competition with each other and with other card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide are paying out higher and higher sums to issuers and merchants in the form of rebates and incentives, a trend that not only hurts the bank card networks' yield on each dollar …

In a major vote of confidence for an 11-month-old form of electronic payment, Hy-Vee Inc., a 224-unit supermarket chain based in West Des Moines, Iowa, has installed back-office conversion (BOC) in 21 of its stores in the Des Moines area since last August and plans to roll out the system …

An absence of incentives?particularly for merchants?is handicapping contactless payments in the U.S., and by extension mobile payment at the point of sale could suffer, according to a new report. About 40,000 U.S. merchants now accept contactless cards and fobs, or 0.5% of all merchant locations. That number will grow to …

Banks and processors looking for a way in to the potentially lucrative market for health-care payments could do worse than to cultivate that market for remote deposit capture, says an expert in electronic check processing. But while hospitals and clinics represent a wide-open opportunity for banks, it's not one that …

The trend toward acceptance of so-called alternative-payment products by online merchants is going strong and will likely continue for some time, driven largely by incentives for merchants and consumers alike and by ease of use, says Adam Cohen, principal at Brulant Inc., an interactive advertising agency in Cleveland. “I would …