• Two merchant organizations have filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting a U.S. Department of Justice filing that asks the full panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hear a 6-year-old case alleging anti-steering rules established by American Express Co. are anti-competitive. A three-judge panel of that court ruled …

Fourth-quarter transaction decline rates for credit and debit cards used for subscription payments increased to 15.9% from a first-quarter 2015 low of 14.4%, based on the value of the transaction, according to a report from Recurly Inc., a recurring-payments specialist. The “Recurly Subscription Snapshot,” which analyzed 25 million recurring payments …

Canadian payment processor Beanstream says its U.S. foray is hoping to tap into its parent company’s international reach as Beanstream USA targets software developers and integrators. Beanstream’s U.S. effort—announced earlier this month—is meant to get a piece of the independent software vendor and value-added reseller market that so many payments …

A handful of arcane mathematicians way back in the 18th and 19th centuries aspired to invent a useless mathematical theory that would shine for its beauty alone, unstained by practical applications. It was called number theory, and it stood useless and shining until late in the 20th Century, when this …

Corporations and wealthy consumers have a new option when they need to move funds internationally. HiFX, a unit of Euronet Worldwide Inc., has begun offering its services to U.S. and Canadian clients. Acquired by Leawood, Kan.-based Euronet in 2014, U.K.-based HiFX enables users to transfer funds internationally in 28 currencies, …

The mobile carriers once stood bestride the payments world as major players. Now, not so much. What happened, and can they stage a comeback? Not so long ago, the mobile network operators, or MNOs for short, cast a long shadow over the nascent business of mobile payments. While banks and …

By John Stewart With Google Inc.’s Sept. 10 launch of Android Pay, competition in the mobile-payments market heated up to an even higher temperature. But in all the talk about tech companies, handset makers, and banks ushering in services like Android Pay, Apple Pay, and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Samsung …

From search engines to social media, online competition has heated up for ISOs and acquirers. What does it take to stay ahead of the pack? If acronyms and terms like SEO, PPC, unique clicks, likes, and tweets sound unfamiliar, the latest digital-marketing efforts used by independent sales organizations and acquirers …

With a crucial deadline just 266 days away, the payments industry is starting to look at just what kind of fraud liability—and how much fraud—merchant acquirers will have to assume if their merchants aren’t ready to accept Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards by October. There’s about $6 billion annually in lost, …

Endpoint The proposal would do some useful things, but that advantage is outweighed by its—and the Bureau’s—disadvantages, says Eric Grover. Rule by regulatory mandarins is not only unconstitutional, it suppresses payments competition and innovation, and consequently consumer choice and value. On Nov. 13, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released its …