April, 2020

• 1 April

  Thoughts in the Time of Plague

  

  At the time of this writing, a plague has descended on the world, and it’s not likely to have lifted by the time you read this column. Covid-19, a respiratory disease caused by a novel form of the coronavirus, originated in China this winter but has now swept through countries …

March, 2020

• 1 March

  Chucking the Checkout

  

  Just as we were preparing to send this issue to press, news came about an interesting effort in Germany to steal a march on developing a checkout-free store. An outfit called VR Payment has created a service called payfree that uses radio-frequency identification technology to let stores scan tags on …

February, 2020

• 1 February

  Crypto Dad’s Digital Dollar

  

  We were no sooner digesting the latest—and rather dour—developments about Facebook’s Libra project than news broke last month that a group including a former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was starting an initiative to develop a so-called digital dollar. Indeed, the group, which has enlisted the resources of …

January, 2020

• 1 January

  Facing up to the Crisis

  

  There is, perhaps, no subject in the digital-payments world more fraught with urgency these days than that of authentication. After all, just about all players in the payments chain, from merchant to service provider to processor to bank, have a huge stake in making sure the customer performing the transaction …

December, 2019

• 1 December

  Crypto And the Big Boys

  

  Close observers of the payments business may have noticed lately that while Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have failed to live up to their promises, some pretty big and important players are nonetheless climbing on the blockchain bandwagon. Perhaps the most prominent of these arrivistes is, of course, Facebook. The social-media …

November, 2019

• 1 November

  The P2P Trap

  

  When the news broke a few weeks ago that PayPal is planning to attach a credit card to its Venmo peer-to-peer payment service, it didn’t surprise many in the payments industry. In fact, the only surprise may be why this move took so long. For years, PayPal has been looking …

October, 2019

• 1 October

  Big Bad Libra

  

  No sooner did Facebook Inc. pull the covers off its Libra cryptocurrency project this past June than the social-media giant ran into a buzzsaw of criticism—from Congress, central bankers, the press, and seemingly right-thinkers everywhere on the planet. Seldom has a payments announcement—let alone one that has to do with …

September, 2019

• 3 September

  The Networks’ M&A Mania

  

  Are the big card networks no longer content to be card networks? You might be excused for thinking so if you looked at the buying binge Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. have embarked over the past year or so—with some participation from American Express Co., as well. Much of this …

August, 2019

• 1 August

  The Key to Answering the Most Pressing Questions

  

  You’re holding this magazine in August, but we here at Digital Transactions are putting the finishing touches on it in July. So forgive us if we venture to look ahead a few weeks and guess what might be crossing your mind as summer begins to run its course. How to …

July, 2019

• 1 July

  Real Time Gets Real

  

  This month, we are featuring two stories about the progress of faster payments. Our cover story, “The Bill-Pay Revolution,” shows how real-time capability is finally asserting itself in a crucial segment of the payments business. Then you’ll find “2020 Vision,” our take on just what’s going on with that Fed-inspired …