A federal judge on Tuesday nullified a pending settlement between American Express Co. and merchants in a class-action lawsuit over AmEx’s anti-steering rules because of improper conduct by a co-lead attorney for the merchants. The decision immediately cast a shadow over the $5.7 billion settlement Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. …

A federal appellate court on Tuesday reinstated a proposed class-action lawsuit over ATM pricing rules that independent ATM operators and consumers filed against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. in 2011 but a district court dismissed in 2013. The ruling originated with three lawsuits filed by the National ATM Council Inc., …

By John Stewart After a three-year gestation period, the Merchant Customer Exchange’s CurrentC mobile-payment service is planning to launch a pilot in Columbus, Ohio, during the last week of August, a source with knowledge of the matter tells Digital Transactions News. The pilot will involve locations belonging to a handful …

By John Stewart Five years after it became the law of the land, the Durbin Amendment remains as controversial as it was then, with virtually no agreement in sight on such questions as whether merchants have cut prices in response to interchange savings or whether consumers have paid more for …

Credit card use, even in merchant categories dominated by debit cards, appears to be growing quicker than debit card use, reports the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in a whitepaper released Monday. The report finds that, from 2007 through 2012, credit cards’ share of payments increased 5% at gas stations …

Some of the nation’s major PIN-debit networks over the past couple of years have quietly instituted so-called participation fees that are assessed for each merchant location in the network. The fees’ progenitor, says a veteran market observer, is Visa Inc.’s Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF), which Visa instituted in 2012. …

With $12 million in new funding, PayRange Inc. wants to place more of its Bluetooth-equipped dongles inside vending machines to enable more consumers to make contactless, and cashless, payments. The funding, announced Thursday by Portland, Ore.-based PayRange, will be used to expand its staff and increase the number of PayRange-equipped …

With little fanfare, some of the nation’s major PIN-debit networks over the past couple of years have instituted so-called participation fees that are assessed for each merchant location in the network. The fees’ progenitor, says a veteran market observer, is Visa Inc.’s Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF), which Visa instituted …

Judging from new Federal Reserve data, April was a month of joy for merchants and credit card issuers as consumers spent more on their credit cards, but for consumer advocates and financial advisors it may have been a month of angst as they saw foolish consumers take on too much …

With its Visa Digital Enablement Program, announced last week on the same day Google Inc. unveiled Android Pay, Visa Inc. has introduced application programming interfaces for card-issuing institutions to link to potentially thousands of digital-payments services with a single integration and without separate business agreements for each. Visa also hopes …