It’s time to replace interchange with a model that fairly represents the value each party receives. Fintechs have shown us the way to create exciting new forms of financial services. But we are merely scratching the surface of what the age of intelligent systems can do for the payments industry. …

Despite scattered successes, too many pitfalls dot the road to widespread merchant acceptance. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies captured the public imagination over the past year, as Bitcoin shattered record after record, PayPal and Square Cash announced they would allow customers to buy cryptocurrency, and major financial institutions such as Bank …

How much attention will the payments industry draw from the regulator and its new director? History would indicate the industry won’t be ignored. PayPal Holdings Inc.’s win earlier this year in its lawsuit against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its prepaid rule may have appeared to push back on …

Individual hackers, organized cyber criminals, and spying nations are all part of a colossal drive to exploit recent developments in artificial intelligence. Why? To create an alternative universe populated by fake characters that are indistinguishable from real human beings with a real name, a real face, and a real bank …

Sometimes you get what you want if you just ask—and if you have the right people asking for you. Just before we went to press with this issue, Visa and Mastercard released the news that they were holding off on planned interchange-rate adjustments for another year, until April 2022. Their …

The drive to build merchant acceptance of cryptocurrency continues to gain momentum with RocketFuel Blockchain Inc.’s announcement on Wednesday that it is rolling out a one-click, blockchain-based payments solution for e-commerce transactions. RocketFuel’s service supports payments or direct bank transfers in 43 cryptocurrencies. The first two merchants to adopt the …

As payments providers ramp up fast-payment capabilities that don’t depend on existing card-payment rails, pressure has mounted on the dominant U.S. card networks to enable quick transfers from senders to accounts held by receivers worldwide. Visa Inc. on Tuesday, for example, announced Visa Direct Payouts, which allows users to send …

Seeking to reduce merchant-account fraud, also known as merchant bust-out fraud, and provide merchants with a way to authenticate consumers, payments-technology provider On The Fly POS is adding Ipsidy Inc.’s Identity as a Service (IDaaS) biometric identity-verification technology to its platform. Ipsidy’s app validates a merchant’s identity by comparing a …

News late Wednesday that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is inquiring into a newly popular alternative for going public comes as payments firms increasingly turn to the method in lieu of a traditional public offering. Reuters reported late Thursday the SEC is contacting Wall Street financial institutions to ask …

The now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t shuffle of interchange-rate changes planned for April may have betrayed a rare introspective moment at the payment networks—which are long used to imposing their fees and rules on the rest of the payments ecosystem at will. And that makes it hard to resist wondering what might be …