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The Internal Revenue Service is delaying for a year its planned withholding requirement for payment-card-accepting merchants whose names and taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) supplied by their merchant processor do not match the corresponding information the IRS has on file, the Electronic Transactions Association reported to its membership today. The delay …
Read More »Isis Adds Specialty POS Equipment Providers As It Readies Its National Rollout
By Jim Daly The Isis mobile-payments service on Wednesday said five specialty point-of-sale hardware makers would integrate Isis’s SmartTap technology into their products. The companies join a number of major POS terminal makers, including U.S. market leaders VeriFone Systems Inc., Ingenico S.A. and Equinox Payments, already committed to supporting Isis …
Read More »Insurer’s Efforts To Dodge Data-Theft Claims Highlight Growing Field of Breach Insurance
Schnuck Markets Inc. found itself in a bit of a pickle recently when it learned that its insurance company is refusing to cover losses from a data breach at the regional grocery store chain that compromised up to 2.4 million debit and credit cards. The Schnucks incident and other recent …
Read More »Free Checking Remains Commonplace, But Not Quite As Common As in the Past
By Jim Daly Plenty of Americans are still getting free checking, but not as many as last year, according to new findings from the American Bankers Association. The Washington, D.C.-based trade group’s latest annual consumer survey says 55% of bank customers spend nothing each month for banking services and ATM …
Read More »Forgotten Fed Report Shows Debit Interchange Could Be in for a Real Haircut
Findings from an overlooked Federal Reserve Board report from last March portend that the possible cuts in debit card interchange as a result of a major court decision last month could be even bigger than many observers initially thought. In the report, the Fed said that authorization, clearing, and settlement …
Read More »The Fed Will Appeal Judge’s Decision To Overturn Its Durbin-Amendment Rule
By Jim Daly The Federal Reserve on Wednesday said it would appeal the July 31 decision by a federal judge overturning the board’s rule implementing the Durbin Amendment, the section of 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act that regulates debit cards. The news came from Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, at a …
Read More »Durbin Judge May Allow Merchant Reimbursement; More Retailers Sue over Interchange
A judge in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday gave the Federal Reserve Board a week to indicate its position about a possible interim rule for implementing the Durbin Amendment, the part of 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act that regulates debit cards, after ruling late last month that the Fed’s current regulations do not …
Read More »Isis Readies Its National Mobile-Payments Rollout with Two Big Issuers on Board
The Isis smart-phone-based payments machine is finally getting in gear, observers say, in the wake of several recent developments involving the service that is jointly owned by three big mobile-telecommunications carriers. Giant card issuer JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Monday said that several of its cards will support the Isis …
Read More »As It Gains Greater Utility, Virtual Currency No Longer Just Plays Games
By Jim Daly The U.S. virtual-currency market grew 52% in 2012 and this year it could more than double to $10.9 billion in purchases, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. What’s more, virtual currency is moving beyond its online-game moorings and into more real-world settings, though …
Read More »Wide-Ranging Hacker Indictment Casts New Light on Some Notorious Breaches
A federal indictment announced on Thursday against four Russians and a Ukrainian man casts new light on some of the biggest breaches of payment card data in recent years. The defendants, affiliated with notorious computer hacker Albert Gonzalez, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence but named as one of …
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