Vantiv-Mercury: Bad News for ISOs? Mercury Payment Systems LLC made its reputation as the leader in a rising niche of independent sales organizations that offer payment processing as part of business-management applications sold to merchants by software developers, dealers, and value-added resellers. In contrast, many ISOs still peddle straight payments …

Jim Daly Has the U.S. payment card industry invited federal regulation by taking so long to replace the magnetic stripe? The massive data breach at Target Corp. as well as other cyber thefts at national retailers disclosed over the past six months have raised the unwelcome possibility among merchant acquirers, …

EMV Will Crush Card Fraud, Survey Says It’s bad news, and maybe good news, for businesses accepting credit and debit cards. Some 43% of businesses report they were exposed to card fraud in 2013, a whopping rise of 14 percentage points from 2012, according to the latest annual fraud survey …

A form of near-field communication that does not require a secure element to complete a mobile payment now has the formal backing of card brands MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. Each of them announced today their respective contactless payment schemes support so-called host card emulation. Host card emulation got a …

A Look Back And a Provocative Look Ahead Welcome to an anniversary party— one played out not in a ballroom or country-club drawing room but in pages of cold print. The milestone we are marking is our 10th anniversary of publishing Digital Transactions, an enterprise we rather immodestly think of …

Some dragons are harder to slay than others, and a few are fire-breathing. Here’s our annual look at the industry’s fiercest beasts, this time ranging from the endless war over interchange to eager-beaver regulators to the woes of digital currency. By John Stewart and Jim Daly If payments were easy, …

With interchange costs ravaging their balance sheets, most merchants will tell you they’d far rather take cash than cards. Not Split Bread. In fact, the San Francisco sandwich shop doesn’t just discourage cash, it plain won’t accept it. Cards only, please. “Cash is expensive,” David Sliverglide, chief executive of Split …

By John Stewart n The good news for merchant processors is that the U.S. acquiring market will turn in a robust performance over the next five years, growing at an average annual rate of 10.5%. The bad news, at least for acquirers that remain wedded to conventional terminals and conventional …

Often regarded as operating in a gray area, merchant aggregators let small businesses piggyback on their merchant accounts. But aggregators are moving to the forefront of payments innovation and winning new supporters. By Peter Lucas Complex, confounding, risky, upstart. These are some of the adjectives used to describe merchant aggregators …

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 …