Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) on Thursday announced that Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) will do the transaction processing for the nascent mobile-payments network owned by some of the nation’s largest retailers. MCX also said department-store company Kohl’s Corp. and the parent company of the Circle K convenience-store chain are …

No sooner had Charlie Scharf taken over at Visa Inc. than he was making nice to retailers. The new chief executive, surveying a history of frayed relations between card networks and merchants, spoke at Visa’s Investor Day conference early last month about building new bridges between the two camps. He …

Settlement? What Settlement? Who said the proposed settlement of a massive court case involving interchange unveiled in July 2012 would put to rest the decades-old dispute between merchants and the bank card networks over card-acceptance costs? Beginning just before Memorial Day, partisans filed three interchange-related lawsuits in less than a …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@bitmint.com The specter of consumers pushing electronic money bits to merchants is a cause for concern in the payment empires of today: the networks. Concern, not alarm, because consumers will continue to have eyes bigger than their pockets, and will be eager for credit. What will the …

Elizabeth Whalen So far, usage of so-called open-fare payment systems is low, and now transit agencies will confront new problems implementing them. As the hardware for accepting payments on public-transportation systems in many cities nears obsolescence, transit authorities are planning upgrades that allow riders to pay fares with something they …

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 …

Karen Epper Hoffman PINless debit card transactions are gaining favor as online merchants latch onto this speedy payment alternative. But will PINless debit’s rise give debit networks much of a boost in the short term? Call it PINless debit version 2.0. The ability to make a payment with a debit …

  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 …

Why Is First Data Dissing PayPal POS? Discover Financial Services has recruited 50 merchant acquirers to bring acceptance of leading online payment system PayPal to more than 2 million physical merchant locations by year’s end. Still holding out, at least as late as late May, was No. 1 merchant processor …

Elizabeth Whalen Merchants focus most of their attention on interchange when they think of card-acceptance costs, but now network fees and related charges are in the spotlight. Are such charges an expression of oligopolistic power? When MasterCard Inc.’s new digital-wallet fee takes effect this month, it will join a growing …