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Nearly 20,000 U.S. merchant locations now accept PayPal, up from 18,000 three months ago, according to data released on Wednesday in tandem with eBay Inc.’s quarterly earnings report. San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal Inc. is a unit of eBay. The roughly 11% jump in merchant acceptance for PayPal since eBay’s …
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Judge Tells Retailer Groups To Settle Their Online Feud Arising From Interchange Settlement
In one of the stranger twists arising from the controversial settlement to credit card interchange litigation, the federal judge overseeing the massive case on Thursday gave lawyers for two feuding merchant groups a week to propose changes to a Web site that urges merchants to opt out of the …
Read More »Credit Cards, Prepaid Cards and Smart Phones Emerge as the Stars of POS Payments Growth
Aided by an improving economy, credit cards staged a comeback in 2012, edging out debit cards as the key payment option at the retail point of sale, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. While debit cards held the greatest share of total dollar volume at …
Read More »Processor Global Payments Prepares To Close the Book on Its Data Breach
With little fanfare, Global Payments Inc. last week disclosed that the payment card networks had returned it their lists of processors compliant with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) following remediation efforts the merchant processor began after the data breach it disclosed a year ago. Atlanta-based Global Payments also …
Read More »Bitcoin’s Price Doubles and a Processor Prospers, but Is the Digital Currency Now Legitimate?
Digital currency Bitcoin is making strides in its campaign to be viewed as a legitimate alternative to traditional payment methods. A major Bitcoin processor—Atlanta-based BitPay Inc.—yesterday announced it had processed more than $5.2 million in Bitcoin transactions for its e-commerce merchants during March. And earlier in the week, the …
Read More »The Gimlet Eye: A Big—But Not Revolutionary—Change
It is the bane of the business press that it is prone to hyperbole. This or that development or trend, worthy of being reported but hardly the Second Coming, is heralded as such in tones of institutional sincerity. Such is the temptation with the news, which broke late in February, …
Read More »Trends & Tactics: The Fed Lets Its Durbin Regs Stand
As they began their work, some Federal Reserve Board governors expressed uneasiness with the task Congress assigned them in 2010 through the Dodd-Frank Act: implement the debit card regulations called for in the sweeping law’s Durbin Amendment. In March, however, the Fed expressed enough satisfaction with its handiwork to declare …
Read More »Security Notes: Loyalty vs. National Currencies: The Boundaries Blur
Gideon Samid • Gideon@BitMint.com Baltimore Green Currency, unlike Bitcoin, is not a challenging currency. It is not competing with the U.S. dollar, but it is rather a dollar tethered to certain restrictions and terms of use. A regular gift card is the same: denominated in U.S. dollars, but effective only …
Read More »Acquiring: Is the National Merchant Market Near an End Game?
Marc Abbey Competition in acquirer fees for large merchants is declining, cementing market shares in place. Here’s why. It has long been the conventional wisdom in U.S. acquiring that the large merchant market was the most difficult, lowest-margin, most commoditized part of the business. Large merchants ranging from the lower …
Read More »Acquiring: Capped Off
Karen Epper Hoffman It’s been 18 months since the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect. Who is benefitting the most from the first government intervention into card-acceptance pricing? A year-and-a-half after the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect, the radical legislation that created the cap remains …
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