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 …

Karen Epper Hoffman PINless debit card transactions are gaining favor as online merchants latch onto this speedy payment alternative. But will PINless debit’s rise give debit networks much of a boost in the short term? Call it PINless debit version 2.0. The ability to make a payment with a debit …

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 …

Peter Lucas The sluggish progress of near-field communication in payments has TSMs looking to extend their services to cloud-based wallets and beyond. Consider the plight of the trusted service manager. Its fate is closely tied to mobile payments that use a form of short-range, interactive radio-wave exchange called near-field communication …

Peter Lucas Consumer frustration with checkout threatens to dampen the mobile-payments boom. Technology to the rescue? When it comes to shopping, mobile devices have untethered online consumers from the constraints of desktop and laptop computers. New York-based market-research firm eMarketer Inc. projects that this year alone sales initiated by mobile …

Shelley Plomske Mobile payments and social marketing are creating many new opportunities for small and mid-sized businesses. Here are some key points for merchants as these new technologies and techniques ramp up.This year will be unlike anything ever witnessed in the payments industry. Driven by the global economic crisis, the …

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 …

  ATM owners and operators are thrilled about the new opportunities deposit automation and mobile devices are creating for their industry. They’re not so thrilled about the major card networks, according to survey findings released Tuesday by the ATM Industry Association, an international trade group of ATM independent sales organizations, …

  Prepaid card program manager Green Dot Corp. will take over direct issuance of the Walmart MoneyCard prepaid card from General Electric Co.’s GE Capital Retail Bank under a deal Green Dot announced on Monday. The acquisition continues Pasadena, Calif.-based Green Dot’s effort to consolidate issuance of the prepaid card …