Each year, Digital Transactions uses this space to lay out the problems impacting the payments industry. This time, the Covid-19 pandemic has inflected our coverage across a wide range of issues. The solutions will have to be far from business as usual. 2020 has been one of those years you …

Yes, consumer usage has grown since Covid-19 set in, but a lack of coordination among industry players has led to confusion at the point of sale. Contactless chip-enabled cards that allow consumers to simply wave their plastic in front of a similarly enabled merchant terminal to complete a purchase without …

Covid-19 has been highly disruptive to the U.S. retail sector, with research estimating sales will fall by 10.5% this year. The same forecast suggests small, mainly brick-and-mortar retailers will see a 14% drop in sales. Even now, months after the pandemic’s first appearance in the U.S market, forty-five percent of …

Visa Inc. may be bidding good riddance to a Covid-haunted fiscal 2020, but the giant payments network made it plain Wednesday afternoon it is looking forward to a very different fiscal 2021. “The pandemic is still with us,” noted Vasant Prabhu, the company’s chief financial officer, but “fiscal year 2021 …

National Retail Solutions, a POS platform provider for independent convenience stores, is reselling an EMV at the pump retrofit kit from Sound Payments Inc. under its own brand that can significantly reduce station owners’ EMV compliance costs. NRS is calling the technology the NRS EMV EZ Pump Solution. The retrofit …

Fiserv Inc. has onboarded 200 banks and credit unions to the Zelle peer-to-peer payments network since the start of the year, doubling the number of financial institutions it has brought into the network since 2017. Of the 200 financial institutions, more than 80% have gone live since March, when the …

As the deadline inches closer for gas stations and convenience stores with fuel pumps to install in-pump EMV card readers, the good news is that c-stores are making steady progress. Overall, 31% of c-stores report not having any pump EMV-ready, down from 52% in the spring and 70% in 2019, …

The Reverse Robin Hood hypothesis sounds compelling. Here’s why it’s wrong. Do rich people pay less for goods and services than the average person? This topic came up recently in The Wall Street Journal article “The Credit-Card Fees Merchants Hate, Banks Love and Consumers Pay.” The reporters quote Aaron Klein’s …

Momentum is building fast for card acceptance on ordinary mobile phones. And now Apple could be the next player in this increasingly important game. The drive to turn mobile devices into point-of-sale terminals without requiring a plug-in card-acceptance device, such as a dongle, got a big shot in the arm …

Despite the slowdown in manufacturing as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, shipments of wearable devices, which are often fitted for payments, are forecast to hit 396 million units in 2020, a 14.5% increase from 2019, says International Data Corp.  During the first half of 2020, 38% of all wearable …