Pricing

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 …

In a bid to forge closer ties to the increasingly important business of creating and marketing mobile apps and other software products, PayPal Inc. this week announced it is waiving transaction-processing fees for nascent developers in a new program it calls Startup Blueprint. The offer is limited to $50,000 in …

With interchange costs ravaging their balance sheets, most merchants will tell you they’d far rather take cash than cards. Not Split Bread. In fact, the San Francisco sandwich shop doesn’t just discourage cash, it plain won’t accept it. Cards only, please. “Cash is expensive,” David Sliverglide, chief executive of Split …

  Ideally, merchants that use payment card acceptance services would know which merchant acquirers they work with. But in a recent report from research firm Aite Group LLC, the most common response when merchants were asked to name their acquirers was “Don’t know.” Of the 491 U.S. merchants surveyed for …

Merchant processors can expect federal regulators to continue cracking down on their industry, Robert O. Carr, chief executive of Heartland Payment Systems Inc., predicted in a speech Wednesday at an acquiring-industry conference. The reason for stepped-up federal oversight, Carr said, is that independent sales organizations haven’t policed themselves effectively. He …

By Jim Daly An injunction that puts New York State’s ban on merchants’ credit card surcharges on hold could be a prelude to a bigger legal assault on states’ surcharge restrictions. If pro-surcharging merchants prevail, their actions could add some oomph to a provision in the pending settlement of unrelated …

JPMorgan Chase & Co., which this spring stopped selling Visa gift cards through its network of branches, has now quit the business entirely. The decision comes weeks ahead of the biggest selling season of the year for gift cards but doesn’t surprise some observers, who point to the challenges recent …

All eyes in the payments business were riveted on Brooklyn earlier this month as lawyers wrangled in federal court over the proposed credit card interchange settlement. What many interested parties—including most observers in the courtroom that day–may have missed, however, is that the hearing brought to light for the first …