A Look Back And a Provocative Look Ahead Welcome to an anniversary party— one played out not in a ballroom or country-club drawing room but in pages of cold print. The milestone we are marking is our 10th anniversary of publishing Digital Transactions, an enterprise we rather immodestly think of …

Capping years of complex litigation, a federal court on Friday approved a controversial multibillion-dollar settlement of a class-action antitrust case challenging credit card interchange rates. With his imprimatur, Judge John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has brought apparent—but only apparent—finality to a …

The recent announcement that U.S. Bancorp would issue American Express-branded credit cards brings yet another big domestic bank into American Express Co.’s network of third-party issuers under a strategy AmEx uses to build transaction volume. AmEx had 77 so-called Network Card License (NCL) arrangements with banks worldwide at the end …

If a recently released annual survey is any indication, small merchants remain unconvinced they are vulnerable to data breaches, pay far too little attention to security, and regard PCI simply as a cost item. “We still see drastic deficiencies in the number of merchants who think they’re at risk,” says …

By Kevin Woodward With the invasion of smart phones and tablets, the iconic payment terminal—and the entire point of sale—is getting a new look. Are the traditional terminal’s days numbered? Perhaps no other device serves as an icon of the payments industry like the point-of-sale terminal. Sitting on a merchant’s …

Coming on the heels of the release last week by the PCI Security Standards Council of a revised Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) is a report Tuesday that shows how much progress small merchants are making in locking down card data—and how painfully slow much of that progress has …

Better management of passwords and prevention of point-of-sale terminal tampering are just two features of the new Version 3.0 of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard that the PCI Security Standards Council unveiled Thursday. On its surface, Version 3.0 looks much the same as the previous edition, 2.0, which the …

Jim Daly Data-breach insurance has become a mainstream product in the merchant-acquiring business, but some executives say PCI compliance and diligent security practices negate the need to buy coverage. What’s next? The unnerving reality that credit and debit card-accepting merchants and their processors can have their computer systems hacked spawned …

Peter Lucas Having invested in new equipment, payment card manufacturers are ready to churn out EMV cards by the millions in the U.S. But issuers that wait too long could be caught short. Common in nearly all of the developed world, Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards have been a long time …

(An Open Letter to the Electronic Payments Industry) n On October 16, 2013, I delivered a keynote address to the Strategic Leadership Forum of the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) on my views of the evolution of the payments industry.  At the beginning of this address, I told the audience that …