There are plenty of good bots out there, but the bad ones are making life difficult for financial institutions and merchants. And it’s only getting worse. What’s to be done? To paraphrase Glinda, the good witch in L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels and the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz: …
Blog Archives
December, 2018
November, 2018
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1 November
12th Annual The 10 Most Pressing Issues in E-Payments
If understanding a problem is the first step toward a remedy, here are 10 first steps for the executives who must grapple with the complexities of payments every day. Well, here we are with our annual list of the 10 issues causing the most sleepless nights for payments executives these …
September, 2018
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30 September
The Tightrope Walk
Processors and acquirers are chasing integrated payments while also serving traditional, terminal-based merchants. Can they keep their balance? The biggest buzzword in payments today is “integrated.” While such payments—exemplified by point-of-sale software with an add-on payments capability that is supposed to be seamless to the user and the consumer—are not …
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2 September
China Calling
The mobile-payments giants Alipay and WeChat Pay are working hard to expand acceptance outside China, and the United States is a prime market. Here’s what that could mean for U.S. merchants— and for the comparatively less successful U.S. wallets. In the four years since its launch, Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay mobile-payment …
August, 2018
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22 August
Digital Transactions 2018 Buyer’s Guide
The Digital Transactions Buyer’s Guide is available as an online, searchable database. Click here to start your search. Want to be included in the Buyer’s Guide? Get the form here.
June, 2018
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29 June
The Sporting Chance
Now that legalized sports betting is up to the states, a market some say is worth $150 billion in transaction value lies in acquirers’ cross-hairs. As this market goes legit, how soon can they cash in? No sooner did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that the question of legalized sports …
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1 June
The Banks Strike Back
Long outclassed by nimble tech players, financial institutions are finally scoring points in the P2P payments game with the rapidly growing Zelle network. But nobody’s conceding defeat in this much-coveted market. Keeping track of the players in peer-to-peer payments is like following an ensemble cast—a playbill is needed to identify …
May, 2018
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1 May
10th Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments
We list 37 entries this year, of which only three appeared in our original Guide nine years ago. This year’s Field Guide represents our 10th annual effort to catalog the broad currents in electronic payments by listing some of the more salient players providing alternatives to the big network brands. …
April, 2018
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2 April
Contactless II
Wave-and-pay flopped when issuers tried it 10 years ago with mag-stripe cards. Now it’s staging a comeback with EMV and mobile payments. The sequel just might be better than the original, but showtime is uncertain. After years of false starts and overenthusiastic hopes, the U.S. just might be about to connect …
February, 2018
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28 February
Smoking out Pot’s Potential
Despite concerns that the federal government will crack down on state-sanctioned marijuana, a small band of payment providers is working to cash in on an exploding industry. It’s no wonder that legal marijuana merchants, and their banks, have been feeling of lot of angst in 2018. In only a matter …


