Pricing

Mobile-payments processor Square Inc. on Wednesday moved to fill a gap in its product lineup by introducing Square Market, an e-commerce service for small U.S. merchants. Square Market publishes a merchant’s Web pages at no charge, doesn’t charge for listings, and charges a straight 2.75% of the sale for a …

Going on the offense for the second time in less than a month, Visa Inc. on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. seeking to prevent the world’s largest retailer from suing Visa over interchange. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart is mulling a legal challenge to the bank card networks on …

Announcing details for its “Cash for Registers” program, which it introduced a month ago, PayPal said it will waive processing fees on volume up to $20,000 a month through Jan. 31. The program officially gets under way July 10, which means early-bird merchants could get more than six months’ worth …

  World War I was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. It didn’t, of course. And the settlement announced last July that was supposed to end lawsuits over bank card interchange and related network rules not only is failing to end litigation between merchants and the card …

  Good news for independent sales organizations: authorization costs continued their long-term decline over the past two years, according to a recent industry survey. Not-so-good news: clearing and settlement costs have stopped declining, customer-service costs are rising, and processors are eyeing new fees to generate revenues from ISOs. Omaha-based The …

  The nascent trend toward tablets as cash-register replacements took several big steps forward this week, as technology players and at least one processor unveiled major promotions, including free transaction processing and other pricing deals, to entice small businesses to adopt mobile payments. On Wednesday, merchant processor Vantiv Inc. launched …

  One full year after complete implementation of the controversial Durbin Amendment’s debit card regulations, the impact on both merchants and consumers—the law’s putative beneficiaries—remains mixed, according to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. While Durbin drastically reduced interchange for the country’s largest banks while …

  The provisions of the Durbin Amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act are starting to hurt smaller issuers’ debit card income even though these financial institutions are explicitly exempted from the law’s cap on interchange rates, according to a debit expert. “This phenomenon is happening as we speak,” said Tony …

  Interchange rates on ATM transactions are falling and may not have hit bottom yet, so independent distributors of ATMs need to look for additional sources of revenue. That is the conclusion of a recently released white paper entitled, “The Future of Interchange in the United States,” sponsored by the …

  New competition from national and regional players is helping to moderate prepaid card pricing for consumers, according to a survey released on Monday by Bankrate.com. Indeed, the majority of the 24 cards studied by the North Palm Beach, Fla.-based information service now carry no fees at all for such …