Law and Regulation

When Zelle launched, consumers were enamored with the ability to send and receive instant, frictionless payments without leaving their banking app. Fraudsters took notice. Social-engineering scams quickly exploited Zelle’s speed and irreversibility, leaving banks, regulators, and consumers tangled in years of disputes over a deceptively simple question: Who was responsible? …

Visa Inc. announced multiple technological initiatives this week that aim to enhance the roles of artificial intelligence, stablecoins and tokens in payments, including usage of the ChatGPT AI program. The plethora of announcements came at the Visa Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco. “AI is transforming the front end of commerce,” Jack …

Payments executives who may be hoping that a court ruling Tuesday will put an end to years of bitter wrangling over card-acceptance costs are likely to be disappointed, experts tell Digital Transactions News. “This does not end the argument. It just stifles it,” says Cliff Gray, principal at Gray Consulting …

For the better part of two decades, I’ve watched the payments industry evolve from a straightforward utility into a labyrinth of technical complexity. Merchant fee structures today are no longer just the cost of doing business. They are a volatile variable that can quietly erode a company’s bottom line. As …

Colorado’s SB 26-134, a bill that would have eliminated sales tax as part of the interchange-fee calculation, has been vetoed by Gov. Jared Polis. SB 26-134, similar to the Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act, would have taken effect Jan. 1, 2028, had Polis approved it. The contentious Illinois law, which …

A last-minute budget move will see the implementation date for the Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act pushed back a year, to July 1, 2027. Originally scheduled to become law Monday, the IFPA would have seen interchange on sales tax and tips prohibited. How it would have been implemented has been …

BTR, a truck-rental company, has compensated for almost $400,000 in annualized credit card acceptance costs through a surcharging a capability provided by payments processor BlueSnap Inc., according to data the processor released Wednesday. Waltham, Mass.-based BlueSnap launched its surcharging API in January in recognition of cases in which merchants want …

As AI makes advances in digital commerce, payments executives are beginning to raise questions about the process and its risks. For some players, the process remains at least partly opaque on such questions as what party takes responsibility when transactions go wrong. Other pending questions include whether the industry can …