Pricing

With merchants looking to cut processing costs and clarify the pricing they pay for card acceptance, a Web site that lets merchants take bids from acquirers is generating between eight and 10 deals a month for at least some of the qualified processors using it. Chicago-based Transparent Financial Services LLC, …

7-Eleven Inc. misled consumers who signed a petition asking Congress to regulate card interchange, MasterCard Inc. charged on Tuesday, one day before officials with the convenience-store chain are expected to deliver nearly 1.7 million signed petitions to Capitol Hill. Armed with the results of a consumer survey, executives with the …

Having lost one brawl with Congress this year over credit cards, big banks apparently are in no mood to fight about another increasingly political issue, overdraft fees. Leading debit card issuers Bank of America Corp. on Tuesday and JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Wednesday announced major changes to their overdraft-fee …

Merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations are paying about 10% less for authorization and back-end transaction processing services than they did in 2007, according to new study by The Strawhecker Group. But, not surprisingly, big acquirers get the best pricing, and new clients of service providers are getting better deals …

Merchants turned up the heat on banks and the bank card networks on Thursday by releasing a report showing that interchange fees in the U.S are much higher than in other countries, and arguing that policymakers in the U.S. should regulate interchange as have their counterparts overseas. “We want to …

Rising processing costs and Visa Inc.'s mandate that point-of-sale terminals be upgraded to do Triple-DES encryption for PIN-based debit transactions are prompting gas sellers to rethink PIN debit acceptance. Fuel sellers are talking about dropping PIN debit because of the hike in cost for authorization, says Branden Williams, director of …

Tuesday's news that Cynergy Data was filing for bankruptcy and planning to sell its assets serves as perhaps an extreme example of the fierce toll the recession is taking on independent sales organizations, observers say. Indeed, some say the ravages of reduced payment volumes, failed merchants, and squeezed margins could …

As an attorney for the merchant plaintiffs predicted earlier this summer, Visa Inc. disclosed Monday that it plans to prepay the remaining $800 million of its settlement obligations with merchants under the so-called Wal-Mart debit card class action for a discounted $682 million. If the plan gets court approval, the …

The increasing popularity of reloadable prepaid cards, particularly among the unbanked and underbanked, has begun to raise alarms among consumer advocates who view the cards as subject to capricious pricing and lacking important protections offered on bank cards. And, as larger merchant and other enterprises become active in issuing these …

Intuit Inc. has quietly introduced an online-payment product that may be aimed initially at small businesses looking for ways to let other businesses pay them electronically, but could move into consumer payments later on. The new service, called Intuit PaymentNetwork, charges a flat 50 cents per transaction, with no set-up …