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In the wake of an important Supreme Court decision early last week, Visa Inc.’s chief executive Thursday afternoon sounded a conciliatory note on the company’s often fraught relations with merchants and touted Visa’s digital-payments initiatives as a way of bringing more value to retailers in return for the fees they …
Read More »Despite Top Court’s Rebuff, Merchants Seek Debit Relief With Fed’s Own Data
The U.S. Supreme Court may have rebuffed merchants seeking to cut debit card transaction costs, but that doesn’t mean they’re entirely out of options. On Thursday, the Merchant Advisory Group, a Minneapolis-based trade group that counts big-box stores and airlines among its 175 members, released a 16-page white paper using …
Read More »Supreme Court Rejects Petition, Dealing Merchants Another Defeat on Debit Cards
Merchants battling debit card pricing and routing rules suffered another defeat on Tuesday. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition from a merchant group seeking to have the high court hear its arguments against Federal Reserve rules regulating debit card interchange and transaction routing. The move leaves intact a lower-court …
Read More »Forgot About HCE? RBC Puts It Front And Center Again With Its Latest Pilot
Remember host card emulation? You might have lost sight of this variant of mobile payments based on near-field communication amid the flood of publicity Apple Inc.’s SIM-based Apple Pay service generated this fall. But HCE never went away, and now Royal Bank of Canada is making a bid to put …
Read More »Pulse Sues ‘Long-Time Monopolist’ Visa Over Post-Durbin Debit Actions, Seeks Rival’s ‘Restructuring’
Over the past several years, during his conference calls with analysts to review Discover Financial Services’ quarterly earnings, chief executive David W. Nelms occasionally took swipes at Visa Inc.’s efforts to maintain its dominant debit card market share in the wake of the Durbin Amendment, which severely undercut Visa’s Interlink …
Read More »Gift Cards Top Holiday Wish Lists, With Total Spending Estimated at $31.74 Billion
Consumers want gift cards this holiday season, but are reluctant to ask for them, finds a survey from CashStar Inc., a Portland, Maine-based company that specializes in e-coupons and digital gift cards. Meanwhile the National Retail Federation forecasts that consumers will spend $31.74 billion on gift cards this holiday …
Read More »Giant Eagle Reverses Spiraling Transaction Costs With Durbin-Assisted Rate Arbitrage
The Durbin Amendment may be best known for its stringent ceiling on debit card interchange, but merchants are discovering that another part of the law that requires transaction-routing choices can be just as effective as rate caps in controlling processing costs. Giant Eagle Inc., a Pittsburgh-based supermarket chain operating nearly …
Read More »Eye on Earnings: MasterCard’s Volumes Grow; Mercury Boosts Vantiv’s Merchant Segment
Financial analysts gave MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. credit for leading a New York Stock Exchange rally Thursday as higher consumer spending on payment cards boosted the networks’ revenues. And processor Vantiv Inc. reported a 42% increase in merchant-processing revenues in the wake of its June acquisition of Mercury Payment …
Read More »Warning: The EMV Chip Card Conversion Will Be Slow and Fraught With Peril
The conversion of U.S. payment cards from the aging magnetic stripe to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card standard will hardly be a seamless transition. That’s the word from a payments researcher and Canadian retail experts who spoke on a panel at a payments conference Tuesday near Chicago. The warnings came a …
Read More »BofA Becomes First Major Issuer to Begin Conversion to Debit Chip Cards
Bank of America Corp. isn’t waiting for 2015 to convert its debit card portfolio to plastic that supports Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip transactions. The Charlotte, N.C.-based banking giant announced Tuesday it will begin issuing debit chip cards to new customers in October, with cards for existing accountholders issued as these …
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