News

May, 2017

• 2 May

  Mastercard’s Transactions Grow 17%, Partly Because of More U.S. PIN-Debit Volume

  

  Mastercard Inc. reported Tuesday that it switched nearly 17% more transactions in the first quarter than it did a year earlier. Most of the growth came from overseas, but some of it resulted from more U.S. PIN-debit volume, company executives said. Purchase, N.Y.-based Mastercard said it switched 14.7 billion transactions …
• 2 May

  First Data and Flywire Team Up and other Digital Transactions News briefs

  • Processing giant First Data Corp. and cross-border payments specialist Flywire Corp. announced a collaboration by which Flywire education and health-care clients will be able to more easily accept cross-border card payments and First Data clients will be able to more readily accept high-value international remittances. • Gro Solutions, a vendor of digital solutions …
• 1 May

  Ninth Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments

  

  The increasing commercialization of mobile payments is showing up in a proliferation of so-called Pays from a bevy of banks, tech companies, and merchants. Time was, a cutting-edge alternative-payment service involved entering card or bank-account details into a branded interface on a laptop computer. Mobile payments were nascent, held back …
• 1 May

  Surcharging Ahead

  

  Merchants like programs that cover their credit card acceptance costs. So do ISOs and acquirers, some of which see a big opportunity in programs that help merchants with surcharging. Surcharging for credit card transactions or offering a cash discount may have obvious benefits for merchants, but these programs also carry …
• 1 May

  Why the Secret Sauce Isn’t So Secret Any More

  

  With the rise of APIs and the race for consumer loyalty, payments players are under pressure to innovate as never before. The result? A new openness to outside developers. If anything in the payments business can be said to approximate a company’s crown jewels, it’s the code that controls, uniquely …
• 1 May

  Nonstop Upgrades

  

  The ATM EMV conversion is only partly done, and now deployers are beginning preparations for Windows 10 only a few years after upgrading to Windows 7. ATM deployers can take solace in the fact that their EMV upgrades are going faster than merchants’ conversion to chip card acceptance. But lest …
• 1 May

  Chip Cards Aren’t on the Menu

  

  Restaurants have been slow to bite on EMV. To get adoption percolating, vendors are introducing methods that let customers add a tip after making a payment or pay with tabletop devices. Paying with EMV cards has been an adjustment for the average U.S. consumer. Cards are no longer swiped. They …
• 1 May

  Why Big Banks Shouldn’t Own the Road to Faster Payments

  

  The same U.S. banks that have retarded progress in digital payments shouldn’t be entrusted with anything approaching a monopoly on implementing real-time payments systems, says Mark Horwedel. Lately, the Federal Reserve Board has been shepherding a cross-industry effort to build a faster, more efficient, and more secure payments system in …
• 1 May

  EMV in the United States: A Post Mortem

  

  The global chip card standard known as EMV became a reality for U.S merchants, acquirers, and issuers in October 2015. That’s when the liability for counterfeit card transactions at the point of sale shifted, by network rules, from issuers to merchants if the merchants weren’t prepared to accept EMV cards. …
• 1 May

  The Top-Heavy Acquiring Industry

  

  Consulting firm The Strawhecker Group is out with its 2016 rankings of U.S. merchant acquirers, and they show that 240 acquirers and independent sales organizations processed more than $5 trillion in payment volume. The 10 biggest acquirers accounted for 80% of that volume. Topping the list is JPMorgan Chase & …