The Credit Card Competition Act is back in play. But as Congress debates the bill, a pressing question looms about its biggest requirement: Who are the Visa and Mastercard alternatives supposed to be? Senator Richard Durbin is back at it. After failing to advance the Credit Card Competition Act out …

Fiserv Inc. is working with data aggregator Akoya LLC to enable consumers to share their financial data with fintech and third-parties with which they do business in a way that doesn’t expose a consumer’s full banking credentials. The partnership will provide Fiserv with access to consumer data from Akoya’s network …

The buy now, pay later craze, which took flight during the Covid pandemic, has turned into a $70-billion-plus segment of the payments industry. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t stirred controversy among acquiring-industry executives, some of whom manage versions of the point-of-sale credit product. That clash of viewpoints emerged Wednesday …

Restaurant point-of-sale provider TouchBistro launched a set of back-of-house technologies, including profit-management and kitchen display systems. Payments provider NMI released first-half 2023 results indicating the company ended the period with connections to more than 3,900 independent software vendors, sales agents, and fintechs. So far, these links have generated more than 2.3 billion transactions and …

Six years after its launch, the RTP Network surpassed 500 million real-time payments on Saturday, network operator The Clearing House Payments Co. reported Monday. The announcement at least temporarily shines the spotlight back onto the current leader in real-time payments in the wake of last week’s much-anticipated launch of the …

The case for the Fed running digital dollars is at best unclear, at worst unwise. Like many central banks, the Federal Reserve has been studying, and socializing, the idea of issuing digital currency, which in some form might be held and used by individuals, firms, banks, and other central banks. …

Peer-to-peer transfers have turned into big business, but one nagging problem remains: there’s no interoperability between networks. Visa is forging a solution, though there are complications.  Peer-to-peer payments have in a relatively short period of time become ingrained in consumers’ daily lives. Whether it’s sending a family member birthday cash, …

The explosive potential that lies in recent advances in artificial intelligence is beginning to be felt in the payments business as banks and fintechs search for ways to wring intelligible trends and operational improvements out of enormous masses of data. The nascent trend toward AI in payments was underscored by …

Merchant losses from online payment fraud globally will total more than $362 billion in the years from 2023 to 2028, according to a forecast from Juniper Research. So-called swipe fees on credit card transactions will increase Fourth of July costs for U.S. consumers by more than $500 million, according to the Merchants Payments …

Open banking specialist Plaid launched Plaid Beacon, an anti-fraud network for fintechs and financial institutions. The fintech Karma Wallet has allied with card-issuing platform Marqeta Inc. to introduce a prepaid card offering cash-back rewards from merchants said to be local, ethical, and sustainable. PayEm, a spend-management platform, has integrated with American Express to allow …