Pricing

Prepaid cards may find favor among younger consumers, one survey finds, while another reports prepaid card programs sport a wide range of fees. Also, armored-car company Brink’s has jumped into the prepaid card mix. Fees on 31 prepaid card programs surveyed by Bankrate.com are scattershot, with the types and amounts …

Payments observers have known for some time that not all companies introducing mobile wallets have met with success, but now Square Inc. has had to shutter a product that succeeded a failed wallet. The San Francisco-based company on Friday began notifying users of its Square Order app that the product …

Merchants that have spent years battling card-acceptance fees are turning a jaundiced eye toward a proposal to speed up payments on the nation’s automated clearing house network. That’s because the same-day settlement proposal, floated in December by NACHA, the ACH’s rules-setting organization, contains a so-called interbank fee that, for some …

Many merchant-services executives have complained for years about so-called margin compression, a relentless loss of profitability driven by competition on price per transaction. But now two researchers argue acquirer profitability, far from collapsing, is actually much better than widely thought. “There has been a lot of talk about margin compression, …

By Jim Daly The U.S. Department of Justice and a merchant group focused on payment card acceptance costs Thursday afternoon hailed a federal district judge’s ruling striking down American Express Co.’s rules banning its merchants from steering AmEx cardholders to lower-cost forms of payment. Earlier in the day, New York …

By Jim Daly In the opinion of Visa Inc.’s lawyers, the Pulse PIN-debit network’s antitrust suit against the leading payment card network shouldn’t even have a pulse because Pulse hasn’t shown it has been harmed. Meanwhile, Google Inc. and a number of merchants that individually sued Visa and MasterCard Inc. …

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 …

Some 400,000 small merchants now accept American Express Co. payment cards through the OptBlue program that AmEx announced nearly a year ago. OptBlue enables bank card merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations to offer AmEx acceptance to small businesses and set the pricing through a one-stop-shopping option when they sell …

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 …

Price compression in the merchant-acquiring business is nothing new, but research from First Annapolis Consulting shows it may be much more intense than previously thought. “The price point that an acquirer must present to sign a new merchant is falling and falling dramatically in the very segments most acquirers would …