Pricing

Issuer and acquirer American Express Co. said its global third-quarter discount rate—what merchants pay to accept the brand’s credit cards—was 2.39%, a slight increase from 2.38% a year ago. The uptick comes more than a year after AmEx said it would shave its worldwide discount rate in an effort to boost …

Two senior Federal Reserve officials said Tuesday they are committed to rolling out the proposed FedNow real-time payments service as quickly as possible, but they didn’t say the original schedule calling for a launch in 2023 or even 2024 will be shortened. “We will be making every effort, I think, to …

AeroPay, the mobile-payments service from Aero Payments LLC, debuted a 1% cash-back rewards program for its users. AeroPay, which uses a connection to the automated clearing house network for its transactions via Dwolla Inc., says consumers using its iOS or Android app can earn unlimited 1% cash-back rewards. The payout …

The recently completed acquisition of Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) by Global Payments Inc. is “the best of the bunch” among the three megamergers in the payment-processing industry this year, investment research firm Morningstar Inc. says in a new report. The Global-TSYS deal “has the most capacity to reduce costs …

Fiserv Inc.’s acquisition of First Data Corp. this year was the first of a trio of big mergers that has made 2019 the year of the megadeals in payments. On Thursday, a key Fiserv executive close to the action explained how the $22-billion acquisition served as the capstone to a …

One of the longest-running antitrust lawsuits in the payments industry is getting into gear again with a new request by independent ATM deployers for class certification in their action against Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. The National ATM Council Inc. (NAC) trade group and 13 ATM independent sales organizations originally …

Merchant processor Square Inc. on Nov. 1 will drop its longstanding 2.75% point-of-sale rate for a new pricing plan of 2.6% plus 10 cents. Based on recent U.S. purchase dollar- and transaction-volume statistics from the bank card networks, Digital Transactions News calculates the new pricing plan will generate about 1% …

Speedier funding of merchant accounts has become a key part of the faster-payments trend as sellers seek ways to gain a competitive edge, and on Tuesday JPMorgan Chase & Co. entered the fray with a same-day deposit service for merchants that bank with Chase. The new service, which is being …

The Federal Reserve’s proposed FedNow real-time payments service won’t be live for more than three years, but bankers and other interested parties peppered two Fed officials with plenty of questions about it Monday. The occasion was a 90-minute webinar in which the officials reviewed the ambitious FedNow plans unveiled last …

Fiserv Inc. said its First Data unit, together with Visa Inc. and Samsung Electronics, is demonstrating a new software-based point-of-sale technology that allows an everyday mobile device to accept contactless payments from contactless cards or phones or wearables equipped with near-field communication. A pilot of the technology is set for Poland …