Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
• Opponents and proponents of repealing debit card interchange controls known as the Durbin Amendment prepared for a hearing on the Financial CHOICE Act Thursday with dueling press releases. The National Retail Federation, as reported earlier this week by Digital Transactions News, led a meeting of retailers interested in keeping the price controls. No retailers were invited to testify at the hearing, the NRF said. “Debit card reform has been a remarkable success,” said Mallory Duncan, NRF senior vice president and general counsel. Meanwhile, the Electronic Payments Coalition, a bank and network advocacy organization, said in its statement that the hearing is “an important step toward repealing the Durbin Amendment, a damaging price control that hurts consumers and small businesses while generating windfall profits for the big box retailers whose lobbyists wrote it.”
• Dwolla Inc. said it will work with Plaid, a provider of bank-authentication tools, to allow users to conduct fully tokenized automated clearing house transactions through Dwolla’s Access application programming interface.
• The ATM Industry Association, which represents independent ATM deployers and operators, released the “Access to Cash: the First Step toward Financial Inclusion” study.
• Financial-institution processor Fiserv Inc. said its first-quarter payments revenue increased to $720 million, a 7.3% increase from $671 million in the first quarter of 2016. Its overall revenue of $1.4 billion, was a 7.7% increase from $1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2016. Its net income of $247 million was 14.5% less than its year-ago total of $289 million.
• Quick-serve restaurant chain Chipotle warned consumers of a breach of its network. Chipotle said it is focusing on card transactions made during the March 24 through April 18 period. “Because our investigation is continuing, complete findings are not available and it is too early to provide further details on the investigation,” a statement on Chipotle’s Web site read.
• Ripple Labs Inc., a blockchain payments provider, said 10 financial institutions joined its network.
• Consulting firm Boston Retail Partners said in “The Mobile World of Retail” report that 89% of retailers plan to offer mobile devices to their employees within three years that can be used as point-of-sale terminals and to enable mobile-payment acceptance.
