American Express Co. disclosed Monday that it will end its multi-merchant Plenti rewards program on July 10. AmEx announced the closure through a tweet on the Plenti Twitter feed and on Plenti’s Web site. “While Plenti has grown in scale since its launch, a number of factors, including shifting priorities …

Valve Corp., which operates Steam, a popular gaming site, said it no longer is accepting Bitcoin because of the digital currency’s volatility and acceptance costs, which reached almost $20 in a transaction last week. Bitcoin processor BitPay Inc. said it raised $30 million in additional funding. In 2014, the company …

Mastercard’s decision to remove the  signature requirement comes as authentication  measures improve in the payments industry.  But what comes next is still a huge question. As unique as signatures are, their value as a way of authenticating a credit or debit card transaction has long passed, a realization many consumers …

Point-of-sale services provider National Retail Solutions announced wholesale grocery distributor Pitco Foods is selling NRS POS terminals in its four warehouse stores. A court ordered PayPal Holdings Inc. to give the Canada Revenue Agency, the country’s national taxing authority, information about Canadians with PayPal business accounts who sent or received …

Merchants say a policy from the card networks short-circuits their choice in the digital wallets they accept and stifles innovation. Honor-all-cards, meet honor-all-wallets. Mention the card companies’ honor-all-wallets (sometimes also referred to as honor-all-devices) policy to a merchant and his blood pressure is sure to spike. Honor-all-wallets rules require card-accepting …

No law in the history of electronic payments has had more impact—or stirred more controversy—than Sen. Durbin’s debit card rules. With emotions running high, will it survive the next half decade? In 2010, the U.S. Congress succeeded in doing something other Western nations had long since done but had always …

Republican backers of repeal of the Durbin Amendment lost a key battle this spring because they concentrated their arguments on Congressmen and financial institutions. Success in the future will depend on firing up consumers, argues Eric Grover. On June 8, the House of Representatives passed the Financial Choice Act, albeit …

In the wake of a failed effort to repeal the Durbin Amendment this spring, many banks, networks, lobbying groups, and other repeal advocates are vowing to try again, as are the Congressmen who pushed the original repeal effort. But that doesn’t mean smaller banks, at least, are totally united behind …

The decision to strip repeal of the Durbin Amendment from a Dodd-Frank overhaul bill puts a brake on the movement to get rid of the amendment’s debit card rules, but that may not necessarily be the end of the matter. Leading advocates for repeal vow to keep fighting, while a …

Two major retailer trade groups late Wednesday celebrated an apparent decision by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to quash a provision that would have repealed the Durbin Amendment. The provision was part of the Financial Choice Act, a bill Congressional Republicans are pushing to overhaul the 2010 Dodd-Frank …