Debit Cards

The turbulent regulatory and legal atmosphere enveloping the U.S. payment card industry is blowing the industry into camps of winners, losers, and those in between. The biggest losers: Visa and MasterCard, large debit card issuers, and consumers. Winners: merchant-funded rewards networks and big merchants. Also likely to gain in the …

Most of the chatter about who will win or lose when the Federal Reserve Board releases its debit card interchange regulations and related rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law centers on card issuers, payment networks, and merchants. But technology vendors are likely to be affected too. One company that …

Contactless debit cards will make their formal debut in Canada next year with the launch of Interac Flash from Acxsys Corp.’s Interac Association, Canada’s national debit network. Interac’s first two Flash issuers are Scotiabank and RBC Royal Bank, which will roll out their first contactless cards next summer. The first …

Closed-loop prepaid cards are growing more slowly than their newer, open-loop cousins, but recent numbers from big payment card processor First Data Corp. show the closed-loop sector still has plenty of life. First Data’s monthly SpendTrend report for October shows reload dollar volumes on closed-loop cards increased 25.2% from October …

Visa Inc. and a prominent law firm serving financial-industry clients want the Federal Reserve Board to regulate debit card interchange by setting an “average effective interchange rate” and then letting the payment card networks set their own rates as long as the average interchange rate on transactions subject to regulation …

Six weeks ago, point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. made an unsolicited, $283 million cash bid for smaller U.S. rival Hypercom Corp., an offer Hypercom immediately rejected as too low and described as “opportunistic and intended to disrupt our business.” Hypercom went so far as to adopt a so-called poison …

Recent meetings between Federal Reserve staff members, consumer groups, and payments executives show just how divergent the views are as the Fed prepares the first-ever regulations on U.S. payment card interchange. Consumer groups are pushing for “at-par” debit card interchange—essentially, no interchange. A big regional bank, however, said the Fed …

MasterCard Inc.’s latest debit numbers seem to indicate the network is going backwards while bigger rival Visa Inc. is racking up 20% gains. But MasterCard executives say the company’s underlying debit card trends are positive and will start showing up in the operational reports next year. MasterCard on Tuesday reported …

With a freshly revised version of industry rules for payment card data security having just emerged (Digital Transactions News, Oct. 28), further evidence is also surfacing of the compliance challenge acquirers face with the smallest merchants. Indeed, the smaller the business, the less sensitive it is to the possibility of …

The specter of regulation cast a pall of uncertainty over Visa Inc.’s latest financials, but the U.S. operating statistics the world’s largest payment network reported on Wednesday bespoke a transaction machine shifting in high, or least a higher, gear. U.S. debit card payments volume broke the trillion-dollar mark in fiscal …