Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Jim Daly B is back. That is, what the Federal Reserve Board back in 2011 dubbed “Alternative B” for implementing the transaction-routing requirements in the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment. Alternative B would have required each debit card to provide the merchant access to at least two signature and two …
Read More »VeriFone Brings Point to the U.S. as Part of a New, Managed-Payments Offering
More than 18 months after acquiring Point, a Sweden-based provider of payment gateway solutions to merchants, point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. announced Monday that it will roll out the service to U.S. merchants beginning this fall. VeriFone intends to offer Point as a managed service through independent sales organizations …
Read More »Retailer-Owned MCX M-Payments Network Takes Shape with FIS As Processor
Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) on Thursday announced that Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) will do the transaction processing for the nascent mobile-payments network owned by some of the nation’s largest retailers. MCX also said department-store company Kohl’s Corp. and the parent company of the Circle K convenience-store chain are …
Read More »With EMV Looming, Fears of Rising Online Fraud Will Drive Biometrics, Expert Says
Biometric authentication will be in widespread use by financial institutions and online merchants by 2015, a payments-security expert predicts. “We’re at the threshold, it’s going to be common in the next year or so,” Al Pascual, a senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, tells Digital Transactions News. Pascual forecasts …
Read More »Small Issuers See Durbin Impact on Interchange, Pulse Debit Study Indicates
The Durbin Amendment’s pricing caps are having an impact on small issuers as well as large, and issuers overall are far from bullish about debit-transaction growth, according to a wide-ranging report released on Wednesday. Issuers exempt from the law’s interchange cap report an average income of 45 cents per transaction …
Read More »Researcher Predicts Almost 90% of U.S. POS Terminals Will Be EMV-Capable by 2017
Nearly 90% of U.S. point-of-sale terminals will be ready to accept Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards by 2017, according to a new Aite Group LLC study. The report examines the reterminalization of card-acceptance locations triggered by the payment card networks’ plans announced in 2011 and 2012 to wean America off of …
Read More »New Consensus on Debit Routing Removes EMV Obstacle But Leaves Timing Unclear
The payments industry may have solved a vexing problem related to EMV chip cards and the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment, but whether that solution will smooth the way for EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa) deployment in the United States is less clear. The EMV Migration Forum, an industry group that has been working …
Read More »How a Brewing Fee Controversy Could Threaten Growth of Prepaid Payroll Cards
A controversy over paying lower-wage workers with payroll cards could threaten the growth of one of the fastest-expanding prepaid card markets, observers say. A lawsuit filed by a former McDonald’s Corp. restaurant worker in Pennsylvania who was paid via payroll card has attracted attention from federal authorities and triggered an …
Read More »Will That Be Chip And PIN Or Chip And Signature? Expert Forecasts EMV Confusion
Payments executives already know the coming changeover from magnetic-stripe cards to chip cards using the Europay-Visa-MasterCard (EMV) standard will be expensive—about $11 billion, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC. But Aite notes that while likely to greatly reduce fraud at the point of sale, the big switcheroo …
Read More »Sale of Financial-Service Unit Narrows Intuit’s Payments Focus on Acquiring, Mobile POS
Intuit Inc.’s sale of its financial-services division, which it announced on Monday, will likely narrow the Mountain View, Calif.-based software giant’s focus in the electronic-payments business, leaving it with an established stake in merchant processing and mobile acceptance. Intuit agreed to sell the financial division to private-equity firm Thoma Bravo …
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