Discover Financial Services has been in the spotlight over the past year because of its high-profile effort with PayPal Inc. to bring the online-payments leader’s service to millions of physical merchants. But that’s just one iron Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover has in the fire. On Monday, the Allpoint surcharge-free ATM network …

Nine months after the Isis mobile wallet launched in Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, usage among small merchants appears to be sporadic at best, despite considerable fanfare and promotion at the launch. But some of the factors blamed by merchants contacted by Digital Transactions News have little to do …

In an effort to free up cash to rebuild its struggling business, payment processor First Data Corp. will stop funding its 24,000 employees’ retirement plans with cash and instead provide stock grants to all employees. New First Data chief executive Frank Bisignano announced the change Monday in a memo to …

Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) on Thursday announced that Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) will do the transaction processing for the nascent mobile-payments network owned by some of the nation’s largest retailers. MCX also said department-store company Kohl’s Corp. and the parent company of the Circle K convenience-store chain are …

A controversy over paying lower-wage workers with payroll cards could threaten the growth of one of the fastest-expanding prepaid card markets, observers say. A lawsuit filed by a former McDonald’s Corp. restaurant worker in Pennsylvania who was paid via payroll card has attracted attention from federal authorities and triggered an …

Settlement? What Settlement? Who said the proposed settlement of a massive court case involving interchange unveiled in July 2012 would put to rest the decades-old dispute between merchants and the bank card networks over card-acceptance costs? Beginning just before Memorial Day, partisans filed three interchange-related lawsuits in less than a …

Elizabeth Whalen So far, usage of so-called open-fare payment systems is low, and now transit agencies will confront new problems implementing them. As the hardware for accepting payments on public-transportation systems in many cities nears obsolescence, transit authorities are planning upgrades that allow riders to pay fares with something they …

Lauri Giesen The ranks of regional EFT networks have dwindled from more than 100 in the 1980s to about 20 today. What are the smaller ones doing to stay alive—and thrive? In the mid-1980s, the United States had about 150 electronic funds transfer networks. Apart from their often colorful names—bygone …

The complexity of federal and state regulation has some operators thinking twice, including Facebook and Microsoft, both of which ditched their currencies. By Linda Punch When federal prosecutors in May shut down digital-currency network Liberty Reserve on money-laundering charges, all eyes turned to other peer-to-peer digital currencies, such as Bitcoin …

The slow death of paper checks showed up again in the latest quarterly statistics from NACHA, the regulatory body for the automated clearing house network. The ACH, which links virtually every financial institution in the country, allows banks and merchants to convert checks into electronic formats. But transaction volume on …