If understanding a problem is the first step toward a remedy, here are 10 first steps for the executives who must grapple with the complexities of payments every day. Well, here we are with our annual list of the 10 issues causing the most sleepless nights for payments executives these …

Discover Financial Services’s lending operations dwarf its payments business, but payments nonetheless are an important component of the company’s growth strategy, new chief executive Roger C. Hochschild said Thursday. Hochschild, who joined Discover in 1998 and served as its president and chief operating officer for 14 years, this month succeeded …

With the economy still humming along, three of the nation’s biggest banks on Friday reported healthy increases in third-quarter payment card purchase volumes. JPMorgan Chase & Co., owner of the nation’s biggest bank-run merchant acquirer, posted $343.8 billion in merchant-processing volume, a 14% increase from $301.6 billion in 2017’s third …

The national trend of merchants passing on their credit card fees continues to accelerate, aided last week by a federal court striking down Texas’s “no-surcharge” law as unconstitutional. The Texas ruling follows the defeat of no-surcharge laws in Florida and California, but it is a unique milestone: Texas is the …

Through the years, the network game hasn’t changed. Payment systems need volume, and that means interoperability with other networks. The key is to be smart about it. The payments world is a patchwork of overlapping and interdependent networks. For success, networks need a path or paths to critical mass. For …

We were just wrapping up this issue when word came of the proposed $6.24 billion monetary settlement of the big federal antitrust case that has, for more than a decade, pitted merchants against card networks and major banks. The deal, however, only settles the money question—how much merchants will get …

With rumors circulating that Amazon.com Inc. is interested in getting into banking and also preparing to open thousands more cashier-less stores, new research results released by management-consulting firm Bain & Co. claim that a large pool of consumers would be willing to bank with the online retailing giant. “Our survey …

Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. announced early Tuesday that they and defendant banks have agreed to settle for $6.24 billion merchants’ monetary claims stemming from 13-year-old litigation over credit card interchange. Today’s announcements represent the second settlement of the sweeping class action known as MDL 1720 pending in U.S. District …

Boosted by profits that mostly exceeded analysts’ expectations, payments companies in August once again beat the major stock indexes even though the markets themselves performed well, according to a new report from Barrington Research Associates Inc. Chicago-based Barrington said Wednesday that 27 publicly traded electronic-transaction processors it tracks posted a …

Distributed ledgers are slowly but steadily working their way into mainstream financial applications. That means the time has come to understand how blockchain works—and to take the technology more seriously, says Esther Pigg. Despite all the hype surrounding it, blockchain—or “distributed-ledger technology” (DLT)—remains a complicated mystery to many. Here is …