June, 2024

• 1 June

  Networks, Merchants, And the Tortured Story of Interchange by Fiat

  

  Market pricing is preferable to legal settlements, which in turn are preferable to government regulation. Will the payments business ever learn that lesson? Many in the payments industry breathed a sigh of relief at Mastercard’s and Visa’s announcement in March of their landmark settlement of a longstanding antitrust suit over …

March, 2024

• 1 March

  Real Time Payments: Where Are the Big Banks?

  

  After the hoopla surrounding FedNow’s launch last year, reality is starting to set in. Payments professionals have been basking in a warm glow as a steady stream of media coverage lauds the long-awaited arrival of faster payments and the uplifting role played by those professionals in bringing the long-dormant, slow-innovation …

February, 2023

• 1 February

  How to Restore Payments Competition

  

  History has shown the two global card networks will never introduce real competition on their own. Time for regulators to intervene. The Fed and the FTC have made a start. The recent clarification by the Federal Reserve confirming that a more than 10-year-old law applies to online debit cards—coupled with …

October, 2021

• 1 October

  Putting Cash in the Past

  

  The demands of modern business have virtually dictated that companies not only should, but must, use digital payments. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, business operations were forced to shift online practically overnight. Work-from-home became the new normal, which created contactless environments for communication and workflows. Payments quickly followed …

April, 2021

• 1 April

  Why Cryptocurrencies Still Aren’t Ready for Prime Time

  

  Despite scattered successes, too many pitfalls dot the road to widespread merchant acceptance. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies captured the public imagination over the past year, as Bitcoin shattered record after record, PayPal and Square Cash announced they would allow customers to buy cryptocurrency, and major financial institutions such as Bank …

February, 2021

• 28 February

  Payments Guys Acting Badly—And Strangely

  

  There has now been a year of pandemic, but also of regulation, litigation, and malfeasance in the payments business. What’s going on, and has anything really changed? Like everyone else in the “Time of Covid,” the people of payments woke up just about every day last year wondering what new …

March, 2020

• 1 March

  How the Fed Has Bungled Durbin

  

  Nearly a decade after the banking regulator’s debit regulation took effect, the legacy has been dramatically higher costs for merchants than Congress intended. It’s been 10 years since Congress enacted debit card reforms to rein in runaway fees and inject competition via the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform …

June, 2019

• 1 June

  Is It Enough?

  

  For Mastercard and Visa chargeback process changes to make the most impact on friendly fraud, merchants will have to take matters into their own hands. About a year ago, Visa Inc. rolled out a new initiative to update, modernize, and streamline chargeback procedures and the dispute-management process. Later in the …

April, 2019

• 1 April

  How To (Really) Code Secure Software

  

  The new PCI software standards represent a big improvement for security, but we’re still waiting for the quantum leap we need. Here’s why. In January, the PCI Security Standards Council released an all-new set of software security guidelines as part of its PCI Software Security Framework. This update aims to …

January, 2019

• 1 January

  Plumbing Meets Human Reasoning

  

  To make faster payments a reality, decades-old core systems have to be streamlined. Here’s an approach that relies on artificial intelligence to avoid the system overhauls that have been tried in the past. The Federal Reserve’s faster-payments initiative has created a catalyst to improve core systems to respond to the …