Pricing

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Partly because of a big increase in skimming, debit card fraud rates jumped in 2015 on both signature and PIN-based point-of-sale transactions, according to the 2016 Debit Issuer Study commissioned by Discover Financial Services’ Pulse electronic funds transfer network. The overall fraud-loss rate on PIN POS transactions …

• American Express Co. reported $2 billion in net income for the second quarter, including a $1.1 billion pre-tax gain from the sale of its Costco Wholesale Corp. cobranded portfolio to Citigroup Inc., which is now issuing a cobranded Costco Visa credit card. AmEx’s U.S. card-billed business grew 2% year …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Canadian unit on Monday stopped accepting Visa cards at its three stores in Thunder Bay, Ontario, carrying out the threat the retailer issued last month in its dispute with Visa Inc. over card-acceptance costs. A spokesperson at Wal-Mart’s Canadian headquarters in Mississauga, Ontario, as well as a …

• Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) announced it is supplying its FIS Cardless Cash ATM service to cash dispensers operated by Payment Alliance International. Ultimately, the service will include 70,000 ATMs in the PAI ATM network. • The United Kingdom’s Competition Appeal Tribunal ruled that Mastercard Inc. must pay approximately …

Bitcoin watchers held their breath over the weekend when the celebrated “halving” took place, abruptly chopping in half the incentive those who produce Bitcoin receive and raising questions about the impact the event would have on the 7-year-old cryptocurrency. The halving, which is part of Bitcoin’s basic code and so …

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 …

• More than 120 retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, Best Buy, and 7-Eleven, signed a letter urging the U.S. House of Representative’s Financial Services Committee to reconsider the elimination of the Durbin Amendment that would happen if two pending bills become law. • After a three-week trial, a Superior Court judge …

U.S. Bank tried, but it couldn’t make its $6.95 fee for real-time person-to-person payments stick. The nation’s fifth-largest bank by assets disclosed Wednesday that such payments are now free. The Minneapolis-based bank says it was the first to go live with real-time payments over the bank-developed clearXchange P2P payments network, …

Merchants that add surcharges to credit card transactions likely can continue to do so despite the overturning of the interchange settlement that enabled them to do so. A federal appeals court last week threw out an agreement initially reached four years ago over card-network interchange and acceptance rules. The interchange …

How do consumers feel about payment card acceptance costs, often referred to as “swipe fees”? According to a recent National Retail Federation survey, consumers want the existing debit card interchange price cap to continue, and they want credit card pricing to benefit them and merchants as opposed to “credit card …