The U.S. Supreme Court may have rebuffed merchants seeking to cut debit card transaction costs, but that doesn’t mean they’re entirely out of options. On Thursday, the Merchant Advisory Group, a Minneapolis-based trade group that counts big-box stores and airlines among its 175 members, released a 16-page white paper using …

Americans love to shop. Whether online, in a small mom-and-pop business, or at a big-box retailer, shoppers turned out in droves this past holiday season. From Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday for example, online sales were up 12.6%–a record week–according to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. For the holiday season overall, …

Some 400,000 small merchants now accept American Express Co. payment cards through the OptBlue program that AmEx announced nearly a year ago. OptBlue enables bank card merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations to offer AmEx acceptance to small businesses and set the pricing through a one-stop-shopping option when they sell …

Card-not-present fraud is the bane of any merchant that operates an e-commerce site, and EMVCo, a standards body for the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) specification, hopes its newly assumed oversight of the 3D Secure authentication standard can help them. Operated as Visa Inc.’s Verified by Visa and MasterCard Inc.’s SecureCode, 3D Secure …

With a crucial deadline just 266 days away, the payments industry is starting to look at just what kind of fraud liability—and how much fraud—merchant acquirers will have to assume if their merchants aren’t ready to accept Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards by October. There’s about $6 billion annually in lost, …

News of a possible card-data breach at chicken-sandwich chain Chick-fil-A caps a year that saw a number of franchised businesses compromised and throws into relief what some experts say is the unique security vulnerability of the franchise business model. Franchised chains, in which so-called owner-operators run stores under a license …

The Gimlet Eye While we were putting together this month’s cover package observing the sixth anniversary of Bitcoin, it struck me that this bête noir of banking shares something in common with that other upstart in digital payments, Apple Pay. Yes, they are different in nearly every respect. For consumers, …

Automated clearing house transactions have settled next day for years, but pressure has been building to speed things up in the 40-year-old system that links nearly every financial institution in the country. So NACHA, the organization that manages the ACH, last month opened for comment a sweeping proposal to introduce …

Financial institutions, processors, and regulators have been moving toward systems that speed up electronic payments, but ironically their success in replacing paper checks with electronic processing may undermine their efforts. That’s because image exchange, the process by which paper checks are replaced by electronic images for clearing, has driven down …

Payments 3.0 This issue inaugurates the Payments 3.0 Fearless Forecast. The expectations discussed here represent a distillation of insights gathered from banks, merchants, card schemes, startups, regulators, and consumers, distilled by 30 years of seeing new payments systems come and go. Apple Pay: 2015 will be the year for Apple …