Lauri Giesen The ranks of regional EFT networks have dwindled from more than 100 in the 1980s to about 20 today. What are the smaller ones doing to stay alive—and thrive? In the mid-1980s, the United States had about 150 electronic funds transfer networks. Apart from their often colorful names—bygone …

The complexity of federal and state regulation has some operators thinking twice, including Facebook and Microsoft, both of which ditched their currencies. By Linda Punch When federal prosecutors in May shut down digital-currency network Liberty Reserve on money-laundering charges, all eyes turned to other peer-to-peer digital currencies, such as Bitcoin …

  Prepaid card program manager Green Dot Corp. will take over direct issuance of the Walmart MoneyCard prepaid card from General Electric Co.’s GE Capital Retail Bank under a deal Green Dot announced on Monday. The acquisition continues Pasadena, Calif.-based Green Dot’s effort to consolidate issuance of the prepaid card …

  Three recent breaches at payment card processors show just how much damage such breaches can do, and provide reminders about how hacked companies do their best to say as little as they can about them publicly. Federal authorities say the latest two breaches, which garnered worldwide headlines in recent …

Mobile dominates this year’s Guide, as you’d expect, but so does the urge toward faster payments. Neither trend is going away any time soon. The obvious theme running through alternative payments nowadays is the predominance of mobile. Processors, solutions vendors, and startups alike are scrambling to make it possible to …

  Consumers making purchases with the Chicago Transit Authority’s coming Ventra combination transit and general-purpose MasterCard prepaid card are expected to incur maximum user fees of $8.45 in a given month, provided the cardholder triggers all the expected fees in that time period, according to processor First Data Corp. The …

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 …

Jim Daly Apple has rolled out its Passbook mobile app for storing and redeeming electronic coupons, boarding passes, and other digital content. Can full-blown payments be far behind? No company is the subject of more speculation than the notoriously secretive Apple Inc. Lately, frenzied tongues have been wagging about what …

Lauri Giesen Declining interchange revenues are squeezing non-bank ATM owners and managers, but new revenue sources and technology could ease the pain. It’s a challenging time for many deployers of ATMs in off-premise locations. With higher costs caused by changing government and network regulations and declining interchange revenue, many independent …

Often regarded as operating in a gray area, merchant aggregators let small businesses piggyback on their merchant accounts. But aggregators are moving to the forefront of payments innovation and winning new supporters. By Peter Lucas Complex, confounding, risky, upstart. These are some of the adjectives used to describe merchant aggregators …