Pricing

Financial institutions wanting to expand the number of ATMs their customers can use in retail locations without those customers paying surcharges have a new option available under an approach announced late last week by Houston-based Cardtronics Inc. While Cardtronics has for years offered financial institutions the ability to put their …

Two powerful lawmakers on Friday wrote to the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board urging the central bank to scrap its debit card interchange caps and instead adopt limits in line with the more draconian regime proposed this week by the European Commission. In their letter to Fed Board chairman …

The Durbin Amendment’s pricing caps are having an impact on small issuers as well as large, and issuers overall are far from bullish about debit-transaction growth, according to a wide-ranging report released on Wednesday. Issuers exempt from the law’s interchange cap report an average income of 45 cents per transaction …

A controversy over paying lower-wage workers with payroll cards could threaten the growth of one of the fastest-expanding prepaid card markets, observers say. A lawsuit filed by a former McDonald’s Corp. restaurant worker in Pennsylvania who was paid via payroll card has attracted attention from federal authorities and triggered an …

Mobile-payments processor Square Inc. on Wednesday moved to fill a gap in its product lineup by introducing Square Market, an e-commerce service for small U.S. merchants. Square Market publishes a merchant’s Web pages at no charge, doesn’t charge for listings, and charges a straight 2.75% of the sale for a …

Going on the offense for the second time in less than a month, Visa Inc. on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. seeking to prevent the world’s largest retailer from suing Visa over interchange. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart is mulling a legal challenge to the bank card networks on …

Announcing details for its “Cash for Registers” program, which it introduced a month ago, PayPal said it will waive processing fees on volume up to $20,000 a month through Jan. 31. The program officially gets under way July 10, which means early-bird merchants could get more than six months’ worth …

  World War I was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. It didn’t, of course. And the settlement announced last July that was supposed to end lawsuits over bank card interchange and related network rules not only is failing to end litigation between merchants and the card …

  Good news for independent sales organizations: authorization costs continued their long-term decline over the past two years, according to a recent industry survey. Not-so-good news: clearing and settlement costs have stopped declining, customer-service costs are rising, and processors are eyeing new fees to generate revenues from ISOs. Omaha-based The …

  The nascent trend toward tablets as cash-register replacements took several big steps forward this week, as technology players and at least one processor unveiled major promotions, including free transaction processing and other pricing deals, to entice small businesses to adopt mobile payments. On Wednesday, merchant processor Vantiv Inc. launched …