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  Karen Epper Hoffman   The recession and the shaky recovery have taken their toll on acquiring, though the business has fared better than most other industries. Now, the business could be set to soar—if factors like Durbin don’t choke off growth.   In an economy where even the strongest …

n by Steve Mott   While most observers have viewed Visa’s recent string of acquisitions as a mere broadening of its conventional card franchise, a long-time analyst of the payments business sees a clever play for dominance of the digital future.   Just when the U.S. payments industry appears poised …

  All Signs Point to Credit Cards’ Recovery   After getting KO’d in the recession, credit card usage is back on its feet. While card issuers are more cautious than they were a few years ago, consumers who have credit cards are using them more frequently, and they are spending …

The bubbling person-to-person payments market boiled over Wednesday when mega banks Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co. announced a joint P2P service dubbed clearXchange. While currently limited to the banks’ customers, clearXchange could be integrated with other P2P systems, and possibly even become …

n Visa Inc. announced on Wednesday a digital wallet aimed at increasing its share of transactions in mobile payments, e-commerce, and at the point of sale. n The digital wallet will store all the payment cards in a consumer’s wallet, including non-Visa branded cards, Jim McCarthy, Visa's head of global …

The telecommunications companies that own the Isis mobile-payments joint venture have apparently given up on the idea of creating their own merchant network and instead are redirecting their efforts on a mobile wallet, according to a published report. If confirmed, the Isis move means that the existing payment card networks …

  Cover Story Mobile-payment schemes proliferate but innovations abound in all corners of the new world of electronic-payment systems competing for consumer and merchant adoption.   By John Stewart, Jim Daly, and Linda Punch       We’re putting on weight. First published in 2009, Digital Transactions’ Field Guide to …

Small debit card issuers are bracing for an eventual loss of 73% of their interchange revenues despite being exempt from pending interchange regulations under the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law’s so-called Durbin Amendment. That’s one of the more notable findings from the Pulse electronic funds transfer network’s 2011 Debit Issuer Study released …

Trends & Tactics   No Apocalypse Now—Or Later—for Debit As Digital Transactions went to press this month, the ultimate extent and timing of the debit restrictions contained in the Durbin Amendment remained unclear. Final rules had not yet issued from the Federal Reserve, and in mid-March a bill appeared in …