Steven Velasquez, Senior Vice President and Head of Partner Business Development – U.S. Bank and Elavon As the 2025 holiday season approaches, a convergence of payments technology – from embedded financial services to Agentic AI – will influence consumer shopping behavior. Adobe for Business projects point-of-sale financing transactions will value …

Merchant organizations contend an expected settlement offer in their ongoing, two-decades-old lawsuit against Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. over card-acceptance fees does not address the underlying problem that leads to high card-acceptance costs in the first place. Merchant opposition surfaced over the weekend after a story in The Wall Street …

Worldpay Inc. early Monday launched its Authentication Optimization service, which uses artificial intelligence to make real-time decisions on whether to authenticate a transaction using 3D Secure or to directly authorize the payment using such factors as risk and issuer preference. The service is being made available to merchants in non-3D …

Attorneys for plaintiffs and defendants in the lawsuit challenging the Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act presented oral arguments Wednesday on plaintiff’s motion for Summary Judgment in the case. Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that the preliminary injunction against the IFPA be broadened so that all financial institutions are exempt from …

PayPal Holdings Inc. has officially launched PayPal Ads Manager, a service that allows merchants to act as their own retail media network and generate new revenue streams, PayPal says. Retail media networks are advertising platforms that allow retailers to sell ad space across the media channels they own or control, …

Merchants are no strangers to rising payment-processing costs. Merchant-processing fees often feel unavoidable, driven by interchange rates and card-network rules that are beyond a merchant’s control. However, in April 2025, Visa introduced a program that could reshape how merchants manage these costs: the Commercial Enhanced Data Program, also known as …

The Gift Card Fraud Prevention Alliance is launching a nationwide social-media campaign to combat gift card fraud this holiday shopping season. The campaign, which runs from Oct. 1 through Christmas Day, will deliver daily messages through the LinkedIn and Instagram platforms on the tactics criminals use to perpetrate gift card fraud …

Landing a coveted merchant account is a top goal for many banks and payment technology firms, but banks may be at a disadvantage. It can cost up to 2.3 times more, on average $496, for a financial institution to onboard a merchant for payment services, as a paytech may spend …