What role government regulators should play as financial-technology companies increasingly challenge banks with new services for consumers and merchants is generating more debate in the electronic-payments industry. At a forum Tuesday, regulators said they want to encourage innovation while protecting consumers, but an executive with an online business lender argued …

EMV chip card payments at the U.S. point of sale have been around, officially at least, for two years now, but consumers still perceive them as slow, and many merchants still don’t accept chip cards, according to a poll of consumers and retailers by merchant processor Cayan. The time to …

  In order to compete in the marketplace, ISOs and agents are going to have to adapt and learn to navigate the rapid tech-driven needs of their merchants based on the consumer demand. Omnichannel is cited as the leading digital priority for 22 percent of retailers [i], providing consumers with …

A panel of processing executives on Thursday sought to shake an audience of merchant-sales representatives out of traditional ways of thinking about critical matters ranging from pricing to new technology. In some cases, years-old tactics came under attack. “How many of you are giving a free terminal away and competing …

General artificial intelligence is not yet here, but some say it is around the corner. We in the payment realm must prepare for the mind-boggling possibility that non-human entities will behave human-like: make money, own money, lose money, become rich, pay taxes, and build an AI social dynamic much like …

Europe’s new payments regulation promises much, including free transactions. But do banks need to be forced to do what’s in the best interests of customers and shareholders? The European Union’s revised payment-services directive (PSD2) changes rules governing payments and is intended to, and inevitably will, impact the roles and economics …

Bitcoin’s wild ride has enriched early investors but left payments geeks asking whether the cryptocurrency can ever be used to buy anything. Let’s say you were an early Bitcoin enthusiast, but not too early. Bitcoin appeared on the scene in 2010, but you, ever cautious about unproven stuff like this, …

If you get rich betting on a certain currency, does that make that currency real? Or must people and businesses agree to accept it as payment for goods and services? If these are the criteria for establishing whether Bitcoin is “real” or not, the 8-year-old cryptocurrency has passed the first …

Merchants say a policy from the card networks short-circuits their choice in the digital wallets they accept and stifles innovation. Honor-all-cards, meet honor-all-wallets. Mention the card companies’ honor-all-wallets (sometimes also referred to as honor-all-devices) policy to a merchant and his blood pressure is sure to spike. Honor-all-wallets rules require card-accepting …

Distributed-ledger technology (DLT) may radically telescope the time for a new payments technology to reach significant commercial use. Forty years passed between the chip card’s invention and its widespread use, and 25 years went by from when a patent was issued for check-imaging technology until Check 21 fully exploited image-item …