U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, author of the now-famous amendment bearing his name that upended the debit card industry, made a figurative trip to court this week to show his support for retailers challenging the Federal Reserve Board’s final rule implementing his provision in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. In a friend of …

An obscure transaction code used by the automated clearing house network for debit card payments is surging as major merchants adopt the payment method and offer significant rewards to customers who use it. The POS code, which refers to ACH debit entries initiated at an electronic terminal, accounted for 4.59 …

Nearly a year after major U.S. rivals introduced mobile wallets, MasterCard Inc. officially entered the market on Monday with a service that aims to trump competing products by being open to a wide range of payment brands and by offering tools that can let third parties develop their own digital …

Visa Inc. in October will double the current $25 purchase limit in its Visa Easy Payment Service to $50 under which no signature or PIN entry will be required for credit and debit card transactions at grocery and discount stores. The network also is changing some chargeback procedures that it says will …

There’s no federal edict to replace fraud-prone magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards with the more secure EMV chip card, but the payment card networks have unveiled various plans in the past year to encourage U.S card issuers, merchant acquirers, and merchants to board the EMV train. Exactly how a U.S. …

Visa Inc.’s pricing plans for merchant acquirers in the wake of the Durbin Amendment have generated controversy in the acquiring industry, and now they’re attracting scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice, the leading payment card network disclosed on Wednesday. Visa said in a regulatory filing that the DoJ’s Antitrust …

MasterCard Inc. on Wednesday posted continued strong growth in debit cards during the first quarter, including in fee revenue. The No. 2 U.S. card network also took issue with the findings of a Federal Reserve report released on Tuesday showing interchange for regulated card issuers has plunged since the Durbin …

In putting together this month’s issue, we were struck, as we are every year, with the changes we found with our Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments. In just the course of the past 12 months, about half a dozen entries have fallen out of our guide because they no …

Quick—which of these five common financial products was the only one to grow last year: credit cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, checking accounts, or personal savings accounts? If you answered “prepaid cards,” give yourself a gold star. New research from Javelin Strategy & Research says fewer consumers in 2011 reported …

Peter Lucas The creature of the nation’s biggest wireless carriers dumped its payments-network strategy a year ago, and now things are looking up for its mobile wallet. The key difference: an emphasis on offers and rewards. It won’t be long before the eyes of the payment industry focus on Salt …