In the four years since Visa Inc. announced the EMV liability shift would be Oct. 1, 2015, merchants, issuers, processors, and other parties have expended huge efforts to prepare for this day. But the real work—converting millions more merchants, issuing millions more chip cards, and educating merchants and consumers—is in …

Those of you who go to payments conferences where Heartland Payment Systems chief executive Robert O. Carr speaks know that Bob has lately taken to pointing out deceptive practices by acquirer representatives in their efforts to sell to merchants. He describes these abuses in some detail and, just to underscore …

Always conscious of keeping prices low, warehouse membership-club stores are tough customers for merchant acquirers and payments networks because they want to shave card-acceptance costs to the bone. So American Express Co., typically the most expensive card brand for merchants to accept, seemingly scored a coup when it announced that …

While a seemingly unending rash of data breaches has payments players scrambling to adopt a panoply of fraud-fighting technologies, little attention has been focused on the consequences for issuers and merchants when cardholders are wrongly turned down at the point of sale because of fraud suspicions. It’s a big problem—bigger …

While it’s a major power in e-commerce processing, PayPal Holdings Inc. has struggled translating that success to the physical point of sale, where the bulk of transactions still happen (“PayPal Unchained,” September). Last month, its luck may have changed. The big department-store chain Macy’s Inc. said it would accept PayPal …

When Nikki Baird and Steve Rowen evaluated retailers’ digital gift cards this year, the thing that surprised them the most was how disjointed the shopper experience is. Card sales that worked just fine at a merchant’s desktop site just didn’t translate well to a mobile device, for example. That could …

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco shows cash still represents 40% of retail payments volume. The study found cash is the lowest-total-cost payment medium for a merchant to accept, simply because the fixed cost is pretty much a requirement for a retail store and the variable …

The EMV era in the U.S. officially started Oct. 1, and for the most part this is shaping up to be an underwhelming launch for chip cards. It’s morning in America for payment cards, the accession of the EMV chip card as the successor to the half-century-old magnetic-stripe card. The …

  Even though mobile wallets appear to be the better bet, card consolidators Coin, Swyp, and Stratos are sticking to their plans. Thumbing through a wallet trying to find the right payment card or loyalty card to rack up points at the cash register is an age-old experience for many …

From leases lopsided in acquirers’ favor to a bevy of bogus fees, dodgy ISOs, sponsoring banks, processors, and leasing companies are exacting a moral as well as monetary cost on the industry. Here’s what’s going on—and how to clean it up once and for all. Picture this. You’re at a …