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 …

We couldn’t recruit David Letterman to help us with this article, but what follows are the Top 10 U.S. payments events of 2013 as identified by the Retail Payments Risk Forum, a research and industry-dialogue unit at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. 10. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized …

More than ever, plastic dominates the business of electronic payments in the United States, with two-thirds of all noncash transactions in 2012 occurring on a card, up substantially from 60% just three years earlier. That’s according to the Federal Reserve System’s triennial payments study, released Thursday. The sweeping research report, …

Retailers, and the trade associations representing them, that are opposed to a $5.7 billion settlement of a class-action antitrust case challenging credit card interchange rates are contesting federal judge John Gleeson’s affirmation Friday of the settlement amount. Defendants in the 8-year-old litigation, which was heard in the District Court of …

  Ten U.S. debit networks have formed the Debit Network Alliance LLC, an organization meant to ensure they have a competitive stake in the debit industry following the U.S. payment-industry migration to the EMV chip card standard, expected within a couple of years. The new group has sprung up as …

A new smart-phone app hopes to give retailers an edge in capturing sales when consumers use their mobile devices in their stores. Dubbed SelfPay, the app enables consumers to pay for merchandise while standing in a store aisle and leave without stopping at a cash register. Developed by Digital Retail …

A new point-of-sale card-acceptance app expected to be available in early 2014 will use pattern-recognition technology to capture a payment card number, potentially speeding up an in-store transaction and eliminating the need for a card reader. n Cartwheel Register eschews a card reader that plugs into the audio jack in …

The first major deadline in the transformation of U.S. credit and debit cards from magnetic-stripe tokens to smart cards embedded with a chip is just under two years away. Come October 2015, the liability for fraudulent transactions shifts to merchants that do not support the chip card standard EMV. n …

Mobile devices, which have fundamentally changed so much of the electronic payments business, are now shaking up the cross-border remittance market. Twelve-year-old Xoom Corp., a relative newcomer to the business, says 37% of its transactions in the third quarter originated on mobile devices, compared to 22% a year ago. More …

Kevin Woodward Tech players that have entered payments aren’t looking to make their living from transaction fees. That may put traditional acquirers on edge, but two can play this game. For as long as anyone can remember, electronic transactions have carried fees for processing. These fees have excited plenty of …