Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
A major merchant trade group on Monday fired an opening shot in what is likely to be a long, hard battle over credit card acceptance costs. The NACS, an association for convenience-store operators, released a report claiming that card discount fees in general—and especially credit card fees–are partly responsible for …
Read More »Why Durbin May Prove To Be a Prepaid Blessing for AmEx And Discover
With banks struggling to find their way in the new Durbin era that puts controls on their debit and prepaid card operations, the door is opening wider for American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services to win new prepaid card business, according to two attorneys familiar with payment card interchange …
Read More »Citing Time Pressures, the ETA Asks Visa to Delay New Acquirer Fee
Accusing Visa Inc. of a “lack of regard” for its members, the Electronic Transactions Association merchant-acquiring trade group sent a letter to the card network March 7 asking that it delay implementation of a new fixed fee until acquirers have time to reprogram their back offices and make other adjustments. …
Read More »Visa to Launch New Acquirer Fee in April That Could Run up to Big Numbers
The bank card networks will introduce new fees for merchant acquirers in April, according to information obtained by Digital Transactions News. The most significant fee is Visa Inc.’s new Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF), a key component of a revamped pricing strategy the No. 1 payment card network announced …
Read More »Facebook Seeks New Revenues with a Promotion for Its Virtual Currency
Behind all the buzz about social payments and virtual currency is an often-overlooked fact: few social-network members today actually use digital money. The antidote for this ailment, according to executives in the social-networking world, is something they call monetization, which is simply a term for tactics that generate revenues from …
Read More »As Payments Boom for Facebook, Competition Could Cut into Revenues
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Read More »Research Identifies an E-Commerce Premium, But How Long Will It Last?
A longstanding truism in the acquiring business is that smaller merchants tend to generate more profit than their larger counterparts. But now research has emerged to show that smaller online merchants are even more profitable for acquirers and processors than brick-and-mortar stores of the same size. In fact, across all …
Read More »How Banks’ PR Fiascoes Compromise Their Ability to Recoup Revenue Lost to Durbin
The banks’ defeat on the Durbin Amendment—followed by their hamhanded efforts to recover lost revenue with explicit debit card fees—may have done more than tarnish their image with consumers. It may also have damaged their ability to deploy revenue-generating programs linked to debit cards, according to Beth Robertson, director of …
Read More »With No Credit Card Cushion, TCF Sees Debit Card Revenue Drop 51%
Yet another big debit card issuer, TCF Financial Corp., weighed in with results from the first full quarter of Durbin Amendment debit card interchange price controls, and they weren’t pretty. The Wayzata, Minn.-based regional bank said on Tuesday that card revenue fell 51% to $13.6 million in the fourth quarter …
Read More »The Durbin Amendment’s Early Toll on Big Banks: $1.1 Billion And Counting
Ouch. The Durbin Amendment, which slapped debit card interchange price controls on big banks beginning Oct.1, cost some of the nation’s largest financial institutions more than $1.1 billion in reduced fourth-quarter revenue. Digital Transactions News calculated that figure based on what seven national or large regional banks disclosed over …
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