Mobile dominates this year’s Guide, as you’d expect, but so does the urge toward faster payments. Neither trend is going away any time soon. The obvious theme running through alternative payments nowadays is the predominance of mobile. Processors, solutions vendors, and startups alike are scrambling to make it possible to …

  Discover Financial Services on Tuesday named six prominent merchant acquirers among 50 committed to helping the network bring acceptance of leading online payment system PayPal to more than 2 million physical merchant locations by year’s end. But a notable missing link is No. 1 merchant processor First Data Corp., …

It is the bane of the business press that it is prone to hyperbole. This or that development or trend, worthy of being reported but hardly the Second Coming, is heralded as such in tones of institutional sincerity. Such is the temptation with the news, which broke late in February, …

As they began their work, some Federal Reserve Board governors expressed uneasiness with the task Congress assigned them in 2010 through the Dodd-Frank Act: implement the debit card regulations called for in the sweeping law’s Durbin Amendment. In March, however, the Fed expressed enough satisfaction with its handiwork to declare …

Karen Epper Hoffman It’s been 18 months since the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect. Who is benefitting the most from the first government intervention into card-acceptance pricing? A year-and-a-half after the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect, the radical legislation that created the cap remains …

Jim Daly Apple has rolled out its Passbook mobile app for storing and redeeming electronic coupons, boarding passes, and other digital content. Can full-blown payments be far behind? No company is the subject of more speculation than the notoriously secretive Apple Inc. Lately, frenzied tongues have been wagging about what …

Lauri Giesen Declining interchange revenues are squeezing non-bank ATM owners and managers, but new revenue sources and technology could ease the pain. It’s a challenging time for many deployers of ATMs in off-premise locations. With higher costs caused by changing government and network regulations and declining interchange revenue, many independent …

Jim Daly Could Congress be convinced to impose Durbin-style price caps on credit card interchange, the way it did with debit cards? Many regard such a scenario as a near impossibility, but hope springs eternal. Unless they’re public-sector contractors, retailers and other business people usually say they want government out …

Credit cards began staging a somewhat wobbly post-recession recovery in 2010 and 2011. But new figures from First Data Corp. and Visa Inc. indicate credit card charge volume is back to just about full health. In a mid-March investor presentation, Visa reported that U.S. credit card payment volume increased 11% …

When in 2010 our solons in Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act with its Durbin Amendment controlling various aspects of the debit card business, many who opposed this mischievous amendment (including us) did so on principles of free-market economics. We pointed out, for example, that the very merchants who were lobbying …