Pricing

An appellate court’s Friday decision reinstating the Federal Reserve Board’s controversial interpretation of the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment with its debit card interchange cap and transaction-routing requirements continues to draw fire, but whether the merchants and retail groups that brought the appeal and lost will trudge on in court remains …

  A new mobile wallet called CloudPay may undercut traditional payment processing fees that merchants typically pay. Announced earlier this week, CloudPay from New Media Insight Group Inc., a Phoenix-based company, says merchants pay only 0.5% per transaction, a markedly lower rate than traditional pricing that might be as high …

In the wake of recent data breaches at Target Corp. and other retailers, U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, author of a famous amendment that regulates debit card interchange, and an ally want to know how well a provision in the amendment that gives a debit card issuer an extra penny in …

American Express Co. is stepping up its campaign to add small merchants to its acceptance base with a program called OptBlue that gives partner merchant acquirers a greater role than they had with an older program called OnePoint. AmEx started testing OptBlue late last year and revealed details about it …

Heartland Payment Systems Inc. on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit against Mercury Payment Systems LLC alleging deceptive pricing by Mercury allowed it to lure scores of merchants away from Heartland and attract prospects to Mercury that had been weighing the two companies for payment-processing services. Heartland’s suit, filed in U.S. …

The U.S. Treasury Department this month began soliciting bids from banks to run its Direct Express prepaid card for Social Security recipients and other beneficiaries. The card program is currently run by Dallas-based Comerica Bank and has encountered political controversy in Washington. Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service is taking …

We couldn’t recruit David Letterman to help us with this article, but what follows are the Top 10 U.S. payments events of 2013 as identified by the Retail Payments Risk Forum, a research and industry-dialogue unit at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. 10. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized …

Capping years of complex litigation, a federal court on Friday approved a controversial multibillion-dollar settlement of a class-action antitrust case challenging credit card interchange rates. With his imprimatur, Judge John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has brought apparent—but only apparent—finality to a …

Might the Bitcoin digital currency be heading toward legitimacy among skeptical regulators and law-enforcement officials? Testimony at a U.S. Senate committee hearing Monday indicated that government may be ready to make peace with Bitcoin and, by extension, other new digital forms of payment, though if and when these new systems …

In two moves to attract and retain merchants, Square Inc. on Wednesday announced that it has eliminated holds on merchant deposits as well as deposit limits on U.S. transactions, and will drop a monthly pricing plan that the mobile-payments processor says merchants didn’t like. The new deposit policy applies to …