(Editor’s note: This is Part II of a two-part article. Part I appeared Thursday.) Interchange fees paid by merchants are the credit card industry’s second-largest revenue source. For debit cards and neobanks, these fees are a primary revenue source. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act imposed price controls on debit interchange fees …

The Cato Institute’s Nicholas Anthony warned recently that the Biden Administration is waging “a war on (payments-industry) prices.” The payments industry provides services funded by a range of fees paid by consumers and businesses. Demagogic regulators and politicians pillory industry fees as exploitative, as “junk fees,” and “a tax.” These …

Capital One’s proposed $35.3-billion acquisition of Discover will be a thunderclap for the debit-card, retail-banking, and payment-network markets. The Discover network has long been the number-five U.S. retail-payment network, after Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and PayPal. Since its acquisition of Diners Club from Citi in 2008, Discover has struggled as …

On Nov. 20, 2023, Mastercard Inc. announced that its Chinese joint venture with Netsunion to process domestic payments had been approved by the People’s Bank of China and the National Administration of Financial Regulation. Was it a victory for, or a mockery of, free trade? If this landmark approval were …

Like a thunderclap, on Oct. 25 the stock price of continental Europe’s biggest payment processor, Worldline, plummeted 59%. It’s down a whopping 88% from its high in April 2021. Macroeconomic conditions are to blame, but so are Worldline-specific factors. The reign of easy money is over. Easy money inflates valuations. …

The yin and yang of political, and ferociously commercial, PayPal was vividly on display with its announcement last month of a massive price hike. The e-commerce phenom attaches itself to an array of woke causes but remains a wonderfully hard-nosed commercial enterprise, keen to be fully compensated for the enormous value …

With his eponymous Durbin Amendment, passed into law just over a decade ago, Illinois’s senior senator intended to hurt large banks, along with Visa and Mastercard. The text, however, couldn’t be as expressly punitive as Durbin might have liked. He would likely have preferred capping debit interchange and network acquirer …

Launched in 1989, Digicash introduced the first cryptocurrency. In the 1990s, it was considered leading-edge payments technology. But physical and digital currencies are payment networks. In payment systems, good technology is neither sufficient nor generally the biggest hurdle. No matter how good the technology, without critical mass they’re worth little.  …

Amara’s Law, coined by Stanford computer scientist Roy Amara, says we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but underestimate it in the long run. So it was with the Internet and mobile phones. So it’s likely to be with digital fiat currencies.  Since …

The payments industry operates on a continuum of varying degrees of politicization, imposed and self-imposed. For maximizing value, less is better. Increased politicization will challenge the payments industry in 2021. U.S. regulators have already exercised enormous discretionary power over payments, sometimes lawlessly. Hatched by the Department of Justice in 2013, …