Issuing/Originating

Federal Reserve Board chairman Jerome Powell is testifying before Congress this week, and mixed in with questions and answers about interest rates, economic growth, and employment could be queries about when the Fed is going to update its cap on the fees issuers can charge for debit card transactions. At …

Buy-now-pay-later specialist Sezzle Inc. said it surpassed 1 million consumers using its online payment service. Launched in 2016, Sezzle said it had reached 500,000 customers only in August 2019. At the end of the fourth quarter, the company, with corporate headquarters in Australia, said more than 10,000 merchants offer its …

A platform to help ensure payments are made to the proper entity is preparing for a May debut. Dubbed Phixius, the Nacha-developed platform will provide a way to enable the secure sharing of payment-related information. That’s important because the platform, announced this week, could save businesses time in vetting new …

Visa Inc. reportedly is planning interchange rate changes that could raise merchants’ acceptance costs for card-not-present transactions but lower costs in some other categories, including purchases at big grocery-store chains. Citing a Visa document circulating among the network’s client banks, the Bloomberg news service reported Tuesday that interchange for a …

The value of payments on the automated clearing house network grew by more than $1 trillion in 2019 for the seventh straight year and transactions increased by more than 1 billion for the fifth consecutive year, ACH governing body Nacha reported Monday. Total payments came to 24.7 billion transactions, up …

Improved online payments, tokenization, and contactless transactions all gained ground in 2019’s last three months for Visa Inc. as the network’s payment volume grew 8% year-over-year. Visa reported total U.S. payment volume of $1.06 trillion in its first quarter of fiscal 2020 ended Dec. 31, a 7.8% increase from $980 …

How will 2019 be remembered for data breaches? Not well. The number of U.S. data breaches tracked by the Identity Theft Resource Center increased to 1,473, a 17% increase from 1,257 in 2018. Drilling into the payments sector, the increase was larger, according to a newly released report from the …

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Task Force on Financial Technology held a hearing Thursday morning titled “Is Cash Still King? Reviewing the Rise of Mobile Payments.” Witnesses included representatives from PayPal, the U.S. Faster Payments Council, the Brookings Institute, Consumer Reports, and a New York City non-profit dedicated to financial …

Mastercard Inc. on Wednesday reported double-digit growth in fourth-quarter purchase volume and transactions, but reduced economic activity from the Coronavirus that originated in China could put a crimp on growth early this year. “We’ll take this as it comes, one step at a time,” Mastercard chief executive Ajay Banga said …

The Apple Pay mobile-payments service is generating 15 billion transactions a year, and Apple Inc.’s new Apple Card helped lift sales of the company’s flagship product, the iPhone, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said Tuesday. “For Apple Pay, revenue and transactions more than doubled year-over-year, with a run rate exceeding …