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Merchant processing is one of the bright stars in U.S. Bancorp’s firmament, and Mike Passilla, the new boss of the Minneapolis-based banking firm’s Elavon merchant-acquiring subsidiary, aims to keep payments shining. Passilla on Monday became president and chief executive of Atlanta-based Elavon, which serves 1.2 million merchants in North America …
Read More »Two Years in Coming, an IRS Reporting Rule Takes Effect
While the payment card industry is bracing for debit card interchange and other regulations that will come next year from the Federal Reserve as a result of the new financial-reform law, merchant acquirers on Monday got a long-anticipated reporting rule. Beginning with the 2011 tax year, acquirers must report how …
Read More »First Data’s Alliance with BofA Helps Fuel Surge in Transactions
Boosted by its big new merchant alliance with Bank of America Corp., First Data Corp.’s transaction count surged 41% in the second quarter, the leading payment processor reported Tuesday. Factoring out the BofA alliance, First Data’s transaction volume from existing merchants grew a much less spectacular but still respectable 9%, …
Read More »Little-Noted, Prepaid Rules Would Cover Non-Banks As Well As Banks
With the growing popularity of prepaid cards and other stored-value devices over the past few years, law-enforcement agencies and regulators have voiced concerns that payment devices intended for consumer convenience could become tools for money launderers, terrorists, and other illicit players. To address those concerns, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial …
Read More »The Dodd-Frank Interchange Haircut Could Exceed $10 Billion
Visa and MasterCard debit card issuers stand to lose up to $10.7 billion in interchange income a year in a worst-case scenario under new federal interchange controls that will take effect next year, according to a Digital Transactions News analysis. Smaller reductions are more likely as the Federal Reserve Board …
Read More »Regulation, Economy Weigh on Acquiring Executives’ Minds
In a year when Congress is beefing up regulation of the financial system, merchant-acquiring executives not surprisingly view the tightening regulatory environment as the key challenge facing their industry in 2010 and 2011, according to a new study from Boston-based Aite Group LLC. Sixty-one percent of executives Aite researchers interviewed …
Read More »Square’s Founder Says the Main Act Is About To Begin
After taking a time out in June to resolve problems ranging from a parts shortage to merchant underwriting, the new payment service Square Inc. is about to commercially distribute its cube-shaped card readers for smart phones. Chief executive officer Jack Dorsey, co-founder of the Twitter social network, told attendees at …
Read More »As the Ink Dries on Dodd-Frank, Merchants Gird for Interchange Battle
As President Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010 into law on Wednesday, at least one major merchant interest group has already fired the opening shot in what promises to be an all-out battle over the fees banks earn on debit card transactions. At the center of …
Read More »NRF And Visa, Often at Odds, Come Together on Storage Rules
Not always the best of friends, the National Retail Federation and Visa Inc. saw fit on Wednesday to jointly announce that Visa had clarified its card-number storage rules to affirm that merchants may present a truncated or disguised number on a transaction receipt for dispute resolution in place of a …
Read More »High-Profile Players Sign on to Promote Mobile-Merchant Technology
As the young market for mobile payments on smart phones takes shape, industry players are scrambling to pair up with world-famous partners with massive numbers of consumer and business customers. Point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc., for example, is selling hardware for its PAYware Mobile application in Apple Inc.’s retail …
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