By Chris Sanson and Marc Abbey   Research shows that even with small merchants, new portfolio additions are bringing in less revenue than the ones that left. Offsetting this alarming trend is something called lifetime value management.       Negative substitution in acquiring is a concept in which …

  By John Stewart and Jim Daly   Having beaten the banks on debit card pricing, they’re now staking out positions on mobile payments and chip cards. This could be the start of the decade of the merchant in the business of consumer payments.       Who controls consumer …

  By Peter Lucas   Spam e-mail may be a constant irritant to consumers, but it’s big business for merchant acquirers willing to settle transactions resulting from those unsolicited ads. Can anything be done to stop it?       Every day some unsuspecting consumer receives an unsolicited e-mail from …

  By Bill Kinnelly and Anthony James   Most of the talk about the Durbin Amendment centers on debit interchange controls, but the sweeping measure must be considered in full and in relation to other costs.       As we enter the Durbin Era of debit card processing, much …

  It’s back to the future, and in many cases higher merchant-acceptance costs for transactions at or under $15, with the bank card networks’ new debit card interchange schedules that will take effect Saturday. That’s the same date that regulated interchange pricing under the Durbin Amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank …

  Newspapers, television, and the Web are full of bleak assessments about the U.S. economy, but you wouldn’t know that from the latest financial and operating results reported by Discover Financial Services, the credit card issuer and student-loan provider that’s also the fourth-largest general-purpose credit card network. Discover card sales …

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  n Some 41% of card-not-present merchants responding to the survey at the Direct Response Forum’s annual conference earlier this month said they do not intend to pass on lower debit card costs to consumers, according to results announced on Thursday by the DRF. Fully 56% said they don’t know …

  What Keeps ATM Execs up at Night?       Complying with new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements and fighting fraudsters who put skimmers on their machines rank high on the to-do lists of ATM managers.   The findings come in a new report from Aite Group LLC …

  Jim Daly   Merchant acquirers are keeping a watchful eye on the bank card networks as the publicly held companies seemingly move onto turf acquirers regard as their own. Are acquirers’ fears about network ambitions justified?       Moving transactions from merchant locations to cardholder accounts and back …