Pricing

With each passing day, the proposed settlement of the giant antitrust suit over credit card interchange and card network rules appears to unravel even more as big-box merchants increasingly express dissatisfaction with the $7-billion-plus deal. The latest is Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which issued a statement on Tuesday opposing the agreement …

More evidence of widespread merchant antipathy to the credit card interchange settlement announced July 13 emerged late Friday when big-box retailer Target Corp. came out against the plan. Industry observers expect more opposition from merchants to emerge, casting doubt on the settlement’s future. But a lobbying group for payment card …

No sooner had the ink dried on a proposed settlement of a massive credit card suit than cracks began to appear in what had been an edifice of merchant solidarity. The NACS, a national trade group for convenience-store operators, on Friday said its board of directors had unanimously rejected the …

The card networks, major U.S. banks, and U.S. merchants reached a $7-billion-plus settlement late on Friday, capping a seven-year battle over credit card interchange and network acceptance rules. If approved by the court, the settlement will be the largest such agreement ever in an antitrust case. Under the terms of …

With a trial date looming in September, speculation is rising that a major antitrust case challenging credit card interchange will result in new rules handing merchants wider latitude in surcharging for transactions, routing payments, and steering customers to other cards or forms of payment. Settlement talks in the case, known …

Person-to-person payments continue to improve technologically and attract consumers, but providers still haven’t figured out how to make money from them, according to new findings from First Annapolis Consulting Inc. Linthicum, Md.-based First Annapolis in the second quarter tested a dozen P2P services from large banks and processors down to …

Citing “ever-increasing student college expenses,” Heartland Payment Systems Inc. reported on Tuesday that it would eliminate three fees on its student-aid prepaid card. Heartland’s move comes a few weeks after the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG), a prominent consumer advocacy group, issued a report highly critical of the …

A network fee introduced this year by Visa Inc. hands so-called merchant aggregators like PayPal Inc. an unfair cost advantage relative to traditional acquirers and independent sales organizations, a top executive with one leading ISO contends. The fee, known as the fixed acquirers network fee (FANF), is a complicated affair …

Facebook Inc. has just done the equivalent of dumping the euro in favor of national currencies with its new policy that will phase out the Facebook Credits virtual currency. The huge social network, which also is introducing a way to pay for subscriptions, says the changes will simplify the user …

In what may be a harbinger of things to come in mobile-payments pricing models, Boston-based LevelUp has dropped its merchant-acceptance fee from 2% of the transaction to zero. Instead, the company will earn merchant fees of 35 cents per dollar of incremental sales generated by the redemption of rewards earned …