February, 2021

• 28 February

  So Where’s the Depression?

  

  A year ago this month, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States had overrun hospitals with Covid-19 cases, closed businesses and public places, and sent the Dow Jones Industrial average plummeting about 9,000 points to a level it hadn’t seen since the fall of 2016. The economic …

January, 2021

• 29 January

  The Digital Dollar Revisited

  

  One year ago in this space, in the waning days of the pre-Covid Age, we presented some thoughts about the newly established Digital Dollar Foundation and its proposal for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for the United States. Since then, the notion of CBDCs has attracted much attention as …
• 1 January

  GoDaddy Gets the Poynt

  

  You may have read last month that the huge Web domain registrar and hosting service GoDaddy is buying a POS terminal startup called Poynt. The deal calls for $320 million in cash upfront and another $45 million in cash down the road. That’s not a bad payday for a company …

December, 2020

• 1 December

  The Network of Networks

  

  Have you noticed lately that the so-called card networks are talking less and less about cards? This seems especially true of what we used to call the two big bank card networks, Visa and Mastercard. They ceased formally being “bank” card networks when they went public a decade ago, and …

November, 2020

• 2 November

  The Fed Inches Toward Real Time

  

  In August last year, when the Federal Reserve announced it would jump into the real-time payments arena, proponents of the idea were elated. A public sector competitor would be needed, they argued, to offset the rapidly advancing network at The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, an entity owned by 25 …

October, 2020

• 1 October

  Contactless Doesn’t Always Mean NFC

  

  If you haven’t noticed stores adopting contactless payments all of a sudden, you haven’t gotten out much in recent months. With a raging pandemic scaring customers away from touching surfaces such as PIN pads and other point-of-sale technology, retailers are rushing to install NFC-equipped devices that will let patrons wave …

September, 2020

• 1 September

  Wall Street And the Payments Biz

  

  As we look at the numbers at precisely 3:15 p.m. Eastern Time on Aug. 17, most of the payments and payments-related stocks we track are up for the day. Indeed, out of a basket of some 17 stocks, only four are down—and there’s still part of the afternoon left. Some, …

August, 2020

• 1 August

  Your Desktop Reference for Months to Come

  

  Here it is August, and the world is still reckoning with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, the world will be at that grim task for many months to come, we fear, until researchers develop, test, and mass-produce an effective vaccine. In the meantime, the business of payments goes …

July, 2020

• 1 July

  A Resilient Industry

  

  We here at Digital Transactions have for the past few months been considering the impact the novel coronavirus is having on the payments business, along with the adjustments the business is making to contend with business lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and social-distancing recommendations. Now the country is re-opening in many states …

June, 2020

• 1 June

  What’s on the Other Side?

  

  Much attention has been focused on the damage Covid-19 has wreaked on state and national economies, not to say on the lives of citizens. But we are entering a time when it may be possible to consider also what a post-pandemic world may look like. Certainly, some of the payments …