Pricing

By Jim Daly The U.S. Department of Justice and a merchant group focused on payment card acceptance costs Thursday afternoon hailed a federal district judge’s ruling striking down American Express Co.’s rules banning its merchants from steering AmEx cardholders to lower-cost forms of payment. Earlier in the day, New York …

By Jim Daly In the opinion of Visa Inc.’s lawyers, the Pulse PIN-debit network’s antitrust suit against the leading payment card network shouldn’t even have a pulse because Pulse hasn’t shown it has been harmed. Meanwhile, Google Inc. and a number of merchants that individually sued Visa and MasterCard Inc. …

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 …

Some 400,000 small merchants now accept American Express Co. payment cards through the OptBlue program that AmEx announced nearly a year ago. OptBlue enables bank card merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations to offer AmEx acceptance to small businesses and set the pricing through a one-stop-shopping option when they sell …

Price compression in the merchant-acquiring business is nothing new, but research from First Annapolis Consulting shows it may be much more intense than previously thought. “The price point that an acquirer must present to sign a new merchant is falling and falling dramatically in the very segments most acquirers would …

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 …

By Jim Daly After a hiatus of more than three years, vending machines that get payment services through USA Technologies Inc. will soon be accepting MasterCard Inc.’s debit cards again as the result of an agreement between the two companies that USA Technologies announced Friday. Under the three-year agreement, “MasterCard …

No one can say for sure why the price of Bitcoin has dived sharply since the turn of the year, but that doesn’t mean market observers don’t have theories. These range from rampant short selling to the hack last week at Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp, in which crooks siphoned out $5.2 …

NACHA on Tuesday opened for comment a sweeping proposal to introduce a same-day settlement mechanism for the automated clearing house network. The comment period will run through Feb. 6, the regulatory body for the ACH announced. If the proposal is approved, the ACH network will process almost 1.4 billion same-day …

While governments and established payments networks around the world reckon with Bitcoin, the upstart digital currency has itself had to reckon this year with volatility that has seen its price plunge about 50% since its $700-plus January high. But in other respects, Bitcoin is riding high. One of the latest …