Law and Regulation

Fees paid by merchants to accept credit card and debit cards will dampen consumer spending power this holiday shopping season as sellers look for ways to offset the cost, says the Merchants Payment Coalition. Swipe fees are projected to cost merchants at least $19.9 billion this holiday shopping season, up …

Banner years are generally welcome, except when it comes to ransomware. New data from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, finds that ransomware payments jumped 77%, or $1.1 billion, in 2023 year-over-year from 2022. The FinCEN Financial Trend Analysis report also found that …

Fraudsters are becoming better organized and building industrial-strength infrastructures to commit fraud, making their actions harder to detect and prevent, says Visa Inc.’s Fall 2025 Biannual Threats Report. The report, which pulls data from the Visa’s global network, identifies the five biggest fraud threats facing the payments ecosystem: the industrialization …

President Trump nominated Stuart Levenbach to be the new permanent director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Levenbach is a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget. Acting director Russell Vought’s term is set to expire in December under the Vacancies Act.  Toast Inc. said it will grant $10,000 to …

A lawsuit filed in March 2016 over how the four U.S. card brands handled the liability shift during the EMV migration more than 10 years ago, along with unreimbursed chargebacks associated with it, has reached its next step. The suit is over unreimbursed liability-shift chargebacks made with a credit or …

As the dust settles around the latest settlement agreement in Visa Inc.’s and Mastercard Inc.’s long running legal battle with merchants over card-acceptance fees, how the offer will impact the payments industry is coming into focus. Early reaction to the agreement from payments experts is that interchange relief will be …

E-commerce technology company New Generation released Kepler, an agentic commerce platform for retailers. Kepler has a suite of tools to help merchants structure, analyze, and present their product data in formats that both humans and artificial intelligence engines can understand, New Gen said. The Pix real-time payments network in Brazil is likely to surpass …

The Federal Reserve announced its FedNow real-time payments network has raised its transaction limit to $10 million from $1 million. The tenfold increase is expected to enable more transactions for such usages as corporate treasury and payroll, vendor payments, and real-estate transactions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a release saying it may not …

The payments industry for some time has been seeking meaningful growth in applications based on cryptocurrency, and early on Wednesday, one of the industry’s biggest players in that corner of the marketplace said it is making that happen with stablecoins—digital currency whose value is tied to fiat money like the …

Defendants in the long-running legal battle over merchants’ card-acceptance costs officially filed an Amended Settlement Agreement Monday. The agreement, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, will provide plaintiff merchants meaningful relief by remedying the concerns expressed by the court over a previously …