March, 2023

• 1 March

  FIS Unwinds Its $43-Billion Worldpay Deal

  

  In the summer of 2019, the giant processor FIS Inc. massively expanded its merchant-acquiring business with its deal for Worldpay. The $43-billion acquisition was supposed to hand FIS a huge advantage in economies of scale and let it leapfrog rivals like Fiserv Inc., which itself had just completed a $22-billion …
• 1 March

  Security Notes: A Renaissance for Physical Cash

  

  If you look beyond the horizon, you’ll see that physical money is gearing up for a roaring comeback. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is the stubborn requirement for the newly designed central bank digital currencies: the requirement of trading continuity. A material coin does not vanish …

February, 2023

• 1 February

  Payments 3.0: An Unfazed CFPB’s Big Agenda for ‘23

  

  Even though the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be working to secure its future throughout much of the year, the agency still has big regulatory plans for 2023. As this column discussed in November, the Bureau will be facing court fights over the prepaid-accounts final rule and, separately, the source …
• 1 February

  Security Notes: Digital Money As a Privacy Tool

  

  After panicking when Bitcoin surged, central banks reconsidered the new technology of money and ostensibly figured out how to fashion it into the most powerful population-control tool ever— a means for fine-tuned surveillance of subjects and citizens alike, and a weapon to monitor people and steer them according to their …
• 1 February

  Why the FTC Singled Out Mastercard

  

  The Federal Trade Commission announced two days before Christmas it had leveled a preliminary consent order against Mastercard Inc. The order—issued to correct what the agency saw as roadblocks the card company had erected against routing online debit transactions to competing networks—may have surprised at least some observers. That’s because …

January, 2023

• 1 January

  Payments 3.0: With P2P Fraud, Focus on Before, Not After

  

  The discussion about fraud in Zelle and other person-to-person payment apps focuses on the wrong question. Providers, industry observers, and regulators are all discussing what should happen when someone is scammed out of money on these apps. Recent conversations have revolved around whether or not banks, payments providers, or the …
• 1 January

  Security Notes: Payments As a Disaster-Recovery Plan

  

  Last month, we noted 81 years since the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. The leaders of the day, smart and learned, did not draw timely conclusions from a very similar attack Japan unleashed on a Russian naval base in 1904. Nor did the same leaders pay much attention to Hitler’s …
• 1 January

  How the Big Banks Are Addressing P2P Scams

  

  An ongoing controversy regarding consumer losses to authorized but fraudulent transfers on the Zelle peer-to-peer platform has stirred at least some of the country’s biggest banks to work out a range of solutions, including wider adoption of scam defense and detection technology, sources tell Digital Transactions. This development comes as …

December, 2022

• 1 December

  Payments 3.0: A Court Clouds the CFPB’s Future

  

  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been under fire since it was created. Now, though the bureau has survived a number of challenges, a recent court ruling has cast a cloud over its future. In October, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in Community Financial Services Association …
• 1 December

  Debit Ruling? What Debit Ruling?

  

  It was only a matter of time before the two big international card networks responded to a recent Federal Reserve requirement that issuers make at least two unrelated networks available to merchants for debit card transactions. That time arrived at earnings season. During an earnings call with equity analysts in …