Pricing

An interchange battle is raging this week in Washington D.C., even though there is no interchange bill pending in Congress. Some merchants, however, hope that will change soon and are pushing their agenda with an advertising campaign that includes a YouTube video and advertising designed to influence new members of …

The merchants have spoken, and they're none too happy with the new pricing plans Google Inc. disclosed earlier this month for its nearly 3-year-old Google Checkout online-payment service. Merchants are registering their ire on Google Checkout's Web site, where many of the 90-plus recent postings in a section reserved for …

More information is trickling out about new transaction fees planned by Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. While the main ones are slightly under 2 cents per affected transaction, when applied to the vast stream of bank card purchases they could produce more than $600 million in new revenues for the …

Announcements last week from two of the major online payment systems, PayPal Inc. and Google Inc.'s Google Checkout, show the two are taking differing roads: PayPal is getting ready for a big growth spurt, while Google Checkout is changing its longstanding pricing plan with tiered rates that amount to price …

The nation's largest processor of e-commerce transactions this week announced its commitment to a test involving PIN debit payments on the Internet. Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, which processes for merchants that control more than half of all U.S. transactions on the Web, expects to sign between three and five sizable …

Lower interchange rates in some cases for online retailers and travel-and-entertainment merchants that accept Visa credit cards and higher bank card authorization fees are set to take effect in the coming months. The good news for merchants is that seven of the 11 Visa consumer credit card interchange rates that …

Discover Financial Services this week unveiled a teen-oriented prepaid card called Current by Discover. Current is the latest entrant in a niche that includes the Visa Buxx and Allow MasterCard, prepaid cards that may have garnered more headlines than users. But Discover says its new card has straightforward pricing and …

Yet another banking industry vendor, NCR Corp., is entering the consumer-capture marketplace. But as the field of providers gets more crowded, financial institutions are struggling to get a decent return on technology that enables consumers to make images of and deposit checks from their homes, according to an industry analyst. …

Nearly two years after introducing a same-day bill-payment service, Metavante Corp. reported on Tuesday its client financial institutions are seeing a 10% adoption rate among active online bill payers on average after 19 months of offering the product. The average rate after nine months is approximately 5%, the Milwaukee-based banking …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Wednesday slashed the pricing it imposes on its prepaid Visa card, cutting the activation fee by nearly two-thirds, the reload fee by 35%, and the monthly maintenance charge by 39%. Since it rolled out its MoneyCard in June 2007, Wal-Mart has sold 2 million of the …