With a crucial deadline just 266 days away, the payments industry is starting to look at just what kind of fraud liability—and how much fraud—merchant acquirers will have to assume if their merchants aren’t ready to accept Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards by October. There’s about $6 billion annually in lost, …

News of a possible card-data breach at chicken-sandwich chain Chick-fil-A caps a year that saw a number of franchised businesses compromised and throws into relief what some experts say is the unique security vulnerability of the franchise business model. Franchised chains, in which so-called owner-operators run stores under a license …

The Gimlet Eye While we were putting together this month’s cover package observing the sixth anniversary of Bitcoin, it struck me that this bête noir of banking shares something in common with that other upstart in digital payments, Apple Pay. Yes, they are different in nearly every respect. For consumers, …

Automated clearing house transactions have settled next day for years, but pressure has been building to speed things up in the 40-year-old system that links nearly every financial institution in the country. So NACHA, the organization that manages the ACH, last month opened for comment a sweeping proposal to introduce …

Financial institutions, processors, and regulators have been moving toward systems that speed up electronic payments, but ironically their success in replacing paper checks with electronic processing may undermine their efforts. That’s because image exchange, the process by which paper checks are replaced by electronic images for clearing, has driven down …

Payments 3.0 This issue inaugurates the Payments 3.0 Fearless Forecast. The expectations discussed here represent a distillation of insights gathered from banks, merchants, card schemes, startups, regulators, and consumers, distilled by 30 years of seeing new payments systems come and go. Apple Pay: 2015 will be the year for Apple …

Cover Story By John Stewart Putting the Silk Road and Mt. Gox disasters behind it, the Bitcoin train is picking up speed. But what’s the real destination? If you want to get an idea of how far Bitcoin has come, take a look at what people are buying with it. At …

Components Biometrics in electronic payments didn’t have much life until last year, when Apple’s Touch ID and other applications gave the technology a shot of adrenaline. What’s next? It’s Act II for biometrics in payments. The now-defunct Solidus Networks Inc., better known as Pay By Touch, dominated Act I for …

Endpoint The proposal would do some useful things, but that advantage is outweighed by its—and the Bureau’s—disadvantages, says Eric Grover. Rule by regulatory mandarins is not only unconstitutional, it suppresses payments competition and innovation, and consequently consumer choice and value. On Nov. 13, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released its …

Retailer organizations are lambasting an Independent Community Bankers of America survey that blamed retailers for breach costs that totaled $90 million at The Home Depot Inc. this year. In a letter to the ICBA and bearing Monday’s date, the chief executives of the Retail Industry Leaders Association, National Retail Federation, …