Pricing

A payments trend that has gained some momentum during the pandemic is open banking, the idea that funds can validated and moved from an account to another one at a different bank inexpensively and by means other than cards or checks. On Thursday, that concept took a big step forward …

Pressure may be building on the Federal Reserve to take action on a debit card interchange-fee regulation that it has left intact for 10 years despite sweeping changes in the payments business, including an onrush of e-commerce transactions over the past year. In part, observers are reacting to a report …

The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC announced three processors—Fiserv Inc., FIS Inc., and Jack Henry & Associates—will offer its real-time payment service to minority-owned depository institutions. The processors and TCH will jointly cover the onboarding fees for these financial institutions connecting to TCH’s RTP network.Datacap Systems Inc. said it will offer the digital …

Merchants have complained for years that they pay too much for debit card acceptance. Late last week, they took their beef to the federal courts with a lawsuit alleging a ceiling set on debit card fees a decade ago by the Federal Reserve is too high and seeking to have …

The chief executives of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover last month came together to start the Payments Leadership Council, a group that also includes the heads of FIS, Fiserv, and Global Payments. Thus, we now have witnessed the final step by adding the keystone to the pyramid of power …

A processing failure has interfered with direct deposit of payroll for an undetermined number of businesses using Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks payroll service. In response to numerous posts on Twitter about the incident, Intuit posted a link to the following notice: “Some payroll customers are reporting they have not received their direct deposit …

After the current U.S. Congress was sworn in, a predictable chorus of merchants, lobbyists, and lawmakers demanded new interchange price caps and other government mandates to decrease credit card interchange fees for merchants. The tired attacks on credit cards are an easy narrative that focuses almost exclusively on the cost …

Intuit Inc. said its Intuit ProConnect unit has partnered with Practice Ignition, a service provider to accounting firms, to provide payments and other services to tax-preparation professionals. Intuit in February sued Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., alleging the networks’ interchange pricing models constitute unlawful price fixing.Payments provider i3 Verticals Inc. said it has acquired two …

App-based technology for point-of-sale transactions has been a preserve of POS system providers like Square and Clover, but now smaller independent sales organizations are looking for a piece of that growing pie. Early Thursday, VizyPay LLC announced VizyPOS, an app that can control such functions as cash discounting and real-time …

Veteran payments practitioners will recall that, “in the beginning,” issuers paid interchange to merchants to incent them to accept credit card payments from the incipient Visa and Mastercard networks.  By the inception of electronic draft capture (circa 1980), that acceptance was growing to a critical-mass level nationwide, and by the late …