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Google Checkout, the payment service of Internet search leader Google Inc., continues to add merchants and charge volume, according to a Google executive. But Google remains guarded about revealing exactly how Checkout is faring with merchants, especially after the reintroduction of acceptance pricing in February marked the end of more …
Read More »Tax Bill Could Be Greater Threat Than Interchange Proposal for Acquirers
The Credit Card Fair Fee Act of 2008 has gotten lots of press for its plan to regulate interchange, but merchant-acquiring industry lawyers say that bill has little chance of passage. The far greater threat is a tax proposal for finding merchants' supposedly underreported cash receipts?a proposal that could forcibly …
Read More »Shell Lowers MasterCard, AmEx Pricing for Its Jobbers And Retailers
While big oil companies at times have temporarily lowered card-acceptance costs in recent years to help gas stations cope with spikes in the price of oil, Shell Oil Co. today said it would permanently lower the price of card processing as well as speed up settlement times for its jobbers …
Read More »Big Gap Yawns Between Banks, Small Businesses on Scanner Prices
The cost of check scanners is the biggest hurdle to small businesses' adoption of remote deposit capture, says a new report from Boston-based researcher Celent LLC. Yet only 15% of banks offer clients free scanners, with half requiring them to buy the machines upfront, either from the bank or from …
Read More »Interchange Bill Raises Questions About Role of Government
A bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives late last week that proposes to lay down new rules for how payment card interchange would be set raises many questions beyond whether the banking or retail lobby carries more clout in Congress. The questions can be summed up in one: …
Read More »Could Free Scanners Unlock Small Businesses for Remote Capture?
With free card-swipe terminals having already captured the imagination of acquirers and merchants, the notion of free check scanners might not be far behind. Indeed, free equipment that reads magnetic-ink-character-recognition lines while capturing check images could be the key for banks to drive remote deposit capture adoption among small businesses, …
Read More »An Acquiring Paradox: Discounts Are Squeezed, But Spreads Are up
Counter-intuitive though it may be, independent sales organizations and merchant acquirers in general are seeing their spreads increase while simultaneously facing margin compression. The reason, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC assessing trends in the acquiring industry: acquirers are generating new revenues from their merchants outside of …
Read More »MasterCard Cuts Interchange for Rent, Utilities, and Insurance
Apartments and other rental real estate such as vacation properties, one of the great remaining virgin markets for electronic payments, could get a boost in April when a new MasterCard Inc. interchange incentive takes effect that will lower card-acceptance costs for property managers. MasterCard's program is intended to direct more …
Read More »How an Incentive Boom Could Push Visa, MasterCard into Acquiring
Locked in increasingly fierce competition with each other and with other card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide are paying out higher and higher sums to issuers and merchants in the form of rebates and incentives, a trend that not only hurts the bank card networks' yield on each dollar …
Read More »Hy-Vee Gives Thumbs up to BOC, Works on Chainwide Rollout
In a major vote of confidence for an 11-month-old form of electronic payment, Hy-Vee Inc., a 224-unit supermarket chain based in West Des Moines, Iowa, has installed back-office conversion (BOC) in 21 of its stores in the Des Moines area since last August and plans to roll out the system …
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