Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
America’s tardiness in adopting EMV chip card technology has long been known to contribute to rising rates of fraud here, but now it appears the country’s plans to convert to EMV are, ironically, causing pain overseas. Fraudulent cross-border transactions on debit cards issued in the United Kingdom increased 25% in …
Read More »Vantiv Wins the U.S. Postal Service’s Merchant-Processing Business
Merchant processor Vantiv Inc. has won one of the biggest retail merchant-processing contracts out there—the U.S. Postal Service’s credit and debit card business, including its USPS.com online component. Counting post offices, branches and substations, the Postal Service has more than 35,000 retail outlets in all 50 states, U.S. territories and …
Read More »As Real-Time P2P Heats up, Acculynk’s PIN-Based Payzur Banks on Network Links
When Acculynk Inc. introduced its Payzur person-to-person payments service two years ago, it saw it as a way of leveraging the company’s virtual PIN-pad technology along with PIN-debit networks to enable faster, guaranteed payments between individuals. n Last month, MasterCard laid down a gauntlet with its MasterCard Send, a back-end …
Read More »As Debit Issuing Lags, Don’t Expect Debit and Credit EMV Parity Any Time Soon
Consumers this fall will begin to dip a lot of EMV credit cards into EMV-compatible point-of-sale terminals, but not so many EMV debit cards. That’s the assessment from Mercator Advisory Group Inc. in its “Prediction for the U.S. Migration to EMV Debit Cards” report released last week. By Oct. 1, …
Read More »With MasterCard Send, MasterCard Promises P2P Payments ‘Within Seconds’
MasterCard Inc. on Tuesday launched a person-to-person payment service in the United States that will allow debit card holders to send money to any other individual with a debit card account, regardless of the card brand and with the money arriving nearly instantaneously. The new service, dubbed MasterCard Send, also …
Read More »Chase Begins Issuing EMV Debit Cards, Expects To Reach 70% of Cardholders by Year’s End
Banking giant JP Morgan Chase & Co. has begun issuing EMV debit cards, with plans to convert its entire debit card portfolio of 34 million cards to chip by the end of 2016, Chase announced Tuesday. Chase began testing chip-enabled debit card issuance in Arizona and Illinois two months …
Read More »Dining, Travel and Household Needs Fueling Retail Sales Growth: Visa
Consumers continued to make retailer tills ring in the first quarter, increasing sales, minus automobiles and fuel purchases, at a 4.5% growth rate over the same period in 2014, finds Visa Inc.’s latest Retail Spending Monitor. Overall retail sales growth, include automobile sales, was a modest 1.2%. The largest …
Read More »Research Shows How Durbin Torpedoed Visa And MasterCard’s PIN Debit Traffic
By John Stewart The Durbin Amendment’s transaction-routing requirements, which have been in effect now for three years, are widely thought to have benefited merchants by increasing competition for debit card traffic. But PIN debit networks that aren’t owned by Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. were expected to benefit as well …
Read More »Costco Gets a Lift by Adding Card Acceptance to Food Courts
By Jim Daly Warehouse retailer Costco Wholesale Corp. has been in the news recently because it is replacing American Express Co. with Visa Inc. and Citigroup Inc. as its major-brand payment card partners. But a little-noticed change in its U.S. stores’ food courts shows what can happen when a retailer adds …
Read More »Younger Consumers Inclined To Choose Debit, Especially for the Rewards
Debit-rewards programs offered by banks appear to be rebounding a little, with younger consumers more motivated than other age groups to use them. That’s according to a new report from payments-research firm Mercator Advisory Group Inc. Debit rewards programs fell out of favor with banks following passage of the Durbin …
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