Evan Schuman's Column in 
FDA Probe of Allied Wallet Is Frightening News for PFs Everywhere
A longtime figure in the payments space and a well-known payment facilitator, Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja, and his company, Allied Wallet, are the subject of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration criminal investigation into online pharmacies, according to an Associated Press report. This wouldn’t be Khawaja’s first run-in with the authorities. Read full story
PCI PIN Change Is A PF Micromerchant Gamechanger
There's one bright spot to the payments industry being encased in a massive overly complex, glacially slow bureaucracy, with certification approval times approaching eons. Read full story
Super Sloppy Security Gushes Aadhaar PII
In many respects, India's 9-year-old Aadhaar national ID system is a global model for simplifying payments, banking and payroll operations. It was designed to be a comprehensive database allowing easy access to bank accounts and other payments mechanisms. As a concept, it worked brilliantly. Read full story
Kroger Details Its Fun-Filled Visa Negotiations
Have retailers suddenly started developing backbones, in terms of pushing back on payments companies? On Monday (June 27), Kroger sued Visa about how it was implementing EMV, in much the same way that Walmart and Home Depot have done. This follows Walmart kicking Visa out of Canada and a major German company rejecting PayPal after PayPal apologized and reinstated it. Did somebody spike the NRF water fountains with super-caffeine or something? Or have merchants decided that they can push back on payments giants with little else of meaningful pain? Read full story
For Brexit Payments, A Big PF Opportunity
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote in the U.K., some payments professionals were panicked given the huge number of European Union payments regulations at play. A U.K. that went its own way on payments—just as it did with monetary policy when it stuck with the Pound and never embraced the Euro—could cause confusion and other problems with cross-border transactions. Read full story
PayPal Reinstates German Company, Apologizes. Company: Thanks, But No Thanks
On Wednesday (June 22), a German company that had been cut off from payments from PayPal because of German privacy rules lashed back at PayPal. PayPal had backed down, apologized and reinstated the company, but the German firm said it was too angry with PayPal to necessarily return. Read full story
Will Police Take Payments During Traffic Stops?
For the payments geeks among us, transaction processing can be arresting. But in a bizarre twist, some police are doing both: arresting and processing payments and doing them both in the middle of a traffic stop on the side of the road. Will the familiar flashing-red-light refrain soon be "License, registration and Visa card, please?" In Oklahoma City, the answer might be "yes." Read full story
CFBP Wants Payments Firms To Police Consumers
In a telling lawsuit, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Monday (June 6) sued processor Intercept Corp. and two of its executives for"enabling unauthorized and other illegal withdrawals from consumer accounts by their clients" and ne having "turned a blind eye to blatant warning signs of potential fraud or lawbreaking by its clients." Read full story
Feds Peer Into Payments Regulatory Crystal Ball—And Get Headaches
For whatever consolation it offers, the feds overseeing payments-related regulatory issues are as apprehensive as payment facilitators. As the payments world is undergoing massive change in new and different ways of handling payments—an area where PFs lead—Justice and Treasury top brass are struggling to figure out the right ways to execute oversight. Read full story
A Scary Peek Into Square's New Privacy Policy
Most privacy policies and terms of service—especially with payments companies—are indeed about privacy. The company's privacy, meaning that they want to keep their customers from knowing it to the extent possible. To that end, most are filled with legalese, are overly long and used the smallest and most difficult to read font as possible. Read full story
PFs May Not Know Mobile Wallet Users As Well As They Think
When the new Auriemma Consulting Group Mobile Pay Tracker report was released on Tuesday (May 31), it delivered some surprises. For example, most mobile wallet consumers do not have their favorite (aka most used) card as the default card in their mobile wallet. Even in April 2016, most mobile users (57 percent) don't have the technology to do almost any mobile payments. The report also detailed the higher incomes of iOS users compared with Android. Read full story
EMV Really Screwing Up Apple Pay
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when EMV data we receive. As more major retail chains fully accept EMV payments, Apple Pay is being dealt some serious experience setbacks, such as being asked twice for price verification and being asked for fingerprint biometric authentication and then, a few screens later, a signature. Neither of those steps were part of the Apple Pay process until merchants switched on EMV. Read full story
In Pizza Hut Asian Restaurants, A MasterCard Robot Takes Orders And Payments—With An Attitude
An interesting MasterCard experiment is going on now at some Pizza Hut restaurants in Asia, where life-size robots take orders and process payments, with the intent of letting more store associates perform more involved customer tasks. (If you'll recall, that was the same argument made for early self-checkout systems.) But what makes this effort different is that these robots are designed to sense emotions and to react accordingly. Read full story
Good Analytics Won't Help If Your Data Sucks
At best, sophisticated analytics software can deliver good answers if the underlying data is accurate and—most critically—is the right data. For a lot of merchants, that is often not the case. Read full story
With A New Mission, Walmart Pay Goes Live In Arkansas, Texas
Now that Walmart no longer has to pretend to be support CurrentC—thanks to its effective demise, courtesy of MCX's concession to reality—the largest retail chain announced Monday (May 16) that it had rolled out Walmart Pay across 110 Walmart stores in Arkansas and 480 Walmart stores in Texas. Walmart Pay the concept was announced by the merchant back in December. Read full story
MCX Concedes The Obvious: CurrentC Is Dead. Indeed, It Was Never Really Alive
When MCX on Monday (May 16) issued a statement that "MCX will postpone a nationwide rollout of its CurrentC application," it was akin to U.S. presidential candidates who suspend their campaigns. It's a polite way of saying "it's over" without having to say those words outloud. Read full story
Chase Makes The Right Security Move After SWIFT Breaches
A report Tuesday (May 17) that J.P. Morgan Chase "has limited some employees' access to the SWIFT global interbank messaging service amid questions about security breaches at a pair of Asian banks that used the funds-transfer platform" raises some concerns, but it appears to be just enforcing a stricter "need to know" and "need to access" approach from Chase. Read full story
Walmart's Visa PIN Lawsuit Puts A "We Want Security" Face On A "We Want More Money" Argument
With their frequent lawsuits and counter-suits, Walmart and Visa is that always-quarreling couple that stays together for the sake of the kids. Only in this case, the kids are the piles of money each makes from the other. Alas, anything that forces the argument of PIN versus signature into the light is a good thing for payments and, by extension, payment facilitators. Read full story
In Australia, Apple Pay Boosts Credit Card, Deposit Account Applications
In Australia, the ANZ Banking Group found something strange happen after it started accepting Apple Pay. It experienced "a surge in applications for credit cards and deposit accounts" to such a degree that it "has forced the other major banks to re-enter negotiations" with Apple, according to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald. In other words, Australian shoppers found the idea of the NFC payment method so significant that they wanted to engage in non-Apple Pay-related banking functions. Read full story
PayPal's New Fraud Rules Are Key For PFs
PayPal announced Wednesday (May 4) a series of payments policy changes, including late-to-the-game restrictions on gift cards, a longtime favorite cyberthief tool. Given PayPal's massive marketshare, payment facilitators need to watch closely any policy changes the no-longer-Ebay-unit makes. In short, any fraud-related changes that PayPal makes gives political cover for any PF to mimic the move. Read full story
PCI Just Gave A Huge Gift To PFs
Merchants of all sizes love to hate PCI. In a perverse sense then, PCI can be a payment facilitator's best friend. The more complicated, difficult and agonizing PCI guidelines become, the more merchants—especially smaller ones—will find tremendous value in pawning off the PCI duties to someone else, especially someone else—such as a PF—that knows PCI and other compliance rules intimately. Read full story
FTC Investigating Venmo, Potentially Raising Compliance Interpretation Issues
Venmo has gotten into trouble—of the embarrassment sort—before with aggressive compliance efforts. That was specifically when it created a list of words that could delay transaction processing, such as the word Persian. And PayPal-owned Venmo was hardly alone, with Chase was caught doing similar word scans, as a man who had a dog named Dash discovered. Read full story
Visa's Quick Chip EMV Move, Banking On Perception To Trump Reality
Using the Electronic Transaction Association's TRANSACT 16 event as a backdrop, Visa on Tuesday (April 19) rolled out Quick Chip for EMV, which the leading card brand described in a news release as being "a technology enhancement that optimizes EMC chip processing and speeds up checkout times." Unfortunately, Quick Chip isn't a technology enhancement nor does it optimize chip processing and it certainly doesn't speed up checkout times. Other than that, the lead of Visa's news release got it right. Read full story
Yapstone's Way Of Unlocking Payments For Renters Everywhere
Paying rent is one of the last—and largest—vestiges of paper-check-writing in the U.S. and it's also remarkably inefficient. Combine that with the fact that rent is often one of the largest monthly costs for the country's roughly 100 million tenants and it's easy to see why Yapstone has focused on rent payments as one of its most critical verticals. Read full story
NYC Subways To Go Mobile Payment—In 2022 (Or Maybe A Bit Later)
You can't fight City Hall, nor can you apparently accelerate it. But mobile payments progress is still mobile payments progress and the county's largest mass transit system on Wednesday (April 13) committed to moving to mobile payments for all mass transit activity. But New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) being the bureaucracy that it is, the RFP that it published Wednesday gives contractors "69 months" (five years and nine months) from the "Notice of Award date to substantial completion." Read full story
Uber Really Doesn't Like Regulators
When Uber published on Tuesday (April 12) what it calls its "transparency report"—a compilation of information delivered to law enforcement and regulators last year—it took the opportunity to express its displeasure that it had to deliver all of those data-dumps. Read full story
Chase's Removal Of ATM Limits Is The Right Idea But For The Wrong Device
Moving more and increasingly complex payments capabilities to ATMs and away from bank branches is a good thing, as we've argued before with ATM ApplePay and with MasterCard's patent application to turn ATMs into full-fledged POS units. But there is a line where it doesn't make sense and JPMorgan Chase's current debate about removing per-day cash limits crosses that line. Read full story
When Payments Disruptions Hit Nashville, Things Are Looking Good
In the world of payments and transportation, the initial phrase of a disruptive technology is to eat away at the user base of traditional payment and transportation methods. But you know things are being really disrupted when those traditional forces embrace the disruption as a way to improve their offerings. In Nashville, Tennessee, that has now happened with Uber and Lyft. As those services disrupt and transform the very notion of urban transportation, mobile payments are going along for the ride—and it's a beautiful one-way trip. Read full story
Payment Regulatory Insanity Two: A Dog Named Dash
Two weeks ago, we told you the tale of PayPal's Venmo going overboard with compliance efforts, when it delayed any transaction that mentioned the word "Persian." Not wanting to be outdone by any PayPal division, Chase has decided to top Venmo in the craziness department. Chase's entry? It blocked the money transfer of a 55-year-old sufferer of muscular dystrophy, who was paying someone to walk his service dog and the dog's name is Dash. Seems that the bank saw Dash as code for Daesh, the Arabic term for the Islamic State aka ISIS. Read full story
Uber's Deal With Green Dot Illustrates Payments Potential
When Uber and Green Dot last week rolled out Uber Checking By Go Bank, it offered little more than a slightly more convenient way for workers to get paid and to be paid more timely. In payments, though, it can be those little conveniences and small elements of automation that can build into a massive change. And who understands that digital disruption concept better than Uber—and payment facilitators. Read full story
Class Action Merchant EMV Lawsuit Could Make The EMV Transition A Lot Messier
EMV has always delivered more than its fair share of headaches and surprises—and this week even has the MasterCard CEO doing some EMV griping of his own—but a class action lawsuit filed last week is raising yet another troubling EMV question. Is the liability shift appropriate if merchants have done everything in their power to embrace EMV? If backlogs from the card brands are why a merchant doesn't have an EMV greenlight, is it fair to punish them with the liability shift? Read full story
Venmo/PayPal Go Overboard On Compliance
If you're trying to use Venmo to pay someone for sitting your Persian cat or for buying a used Persian rug, don't actually use the word "Persian" or be prepared to wait longer. And you can thank a compliance program that is perhaps going a few steps too far. Read full story
FTC Launches PCI Probe. Ruh-Roh
On Monday (March 7), the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a government investigation of PCI, zeroing in on potentially excessive charges, inconsistency in enforcement and rampant conflicts of interest. As famed QSA Scooby Doo would have said, "Ruh-roh." Read full story
ExxonMobil Now Accepts ApplePay, But Rejects NFC. Bad Move
Wanting to avoid having to purchase and install NFC-friendly card readers at its stations, ExxonMobil has opted to use ApplePay but only as an in-app method, from within the petro company's own app. Read full story
Payments Crime Of The Week: A New Twist On Quarterly Earnings
In a new twist on the concept of quarterly earnings, a Brink's Company armored transport service money processing manager used his access to the Federal Reserve Coin Inventory to pocket some loose change. Specifically, he grabbed 784,000 quarters, worth $196,000. But how exactly did he take home 9,800 pounds of coinage? That's where this tale took a turn positively borrowed from Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Read full story
Dwolla's $100K CFPB Security Fine Wasn't For What It Did As Much As What It Said
Dwolla got slapped down hard on Wednesday (March 2) by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for a series of security violations. But due to a dearth of meaningful federal security laws, CFPB's $100K fine of Dwolla had to follow in the footsteps of fellow federal regulator Federal Trade Commission. They can't punish a company for what it did nearly as easily as they can punish it for not doing what it says. Read full story
A Shopper's Checkout Friction Resistance Level Changes Hourly
The idea that shoppers abandon shopping carts when they run into checkout friction has been said so often that it is approaching cliché status. The truth is much more nuanced and complicated. The level of checkout-friction-resistance changes—for the identical consumer—repeatedly during the merchant interaction. Read full story
Why The ChasePay/Starbucks Deal Makes A Difference
When Chase revealed on Tuesday (Feb. 23) that it had cut a deal with Starbucks to incorporate ChasePay into the SBUX mobile app this year, it signaled that ChasePay needs to be taken seriously. More precisely, it means that the mocha-merchant mobile-powerbroker takes ChasePay seriously, which is perhaps the best endorsement it could get. Read full story
PF Flint Mobile Shuts Down, Turns Business Over To Stripe
Payment facilitator Flint Mobile's payments business was effectively shuttered on Monday (Feb. 15), seemingly a victim of a payments player coming into an already-developed market too late and with insufficiently deep pockets. Read full story
To A PF, The World Of Parking Is Doing Anything But Standing Still
Pity the poor standalone parking meter, nestled between communities' sidewalks and streets. A dozen years ago, five million were scattered across the U.S.. Today, according to the International Parking Institute, no one even bothers to count them any more. New York City is preparing to abandon its 85,000 meters to a PF-fueled mobile system, joining Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh with similar plans. Read full story
PCI Council's New EMV Payment Rules Are Worth Reading Closely
The PCI Council in late December rolled out its security rules for token service providers for EMV payment tokens, which overwhelmingly deals with mobile transactions. Today, the card brands handle the vast majority of tokens issued, but the council expects that to sharply change now that EMVCo has released the specification. Given the importance of tokens to payment facilitators, it's worth a read. Read full story
Reading The SEC Filing Tea Leaves: What To Make Of New Visa/Square And Amex/Costco Details?
As a business reporter, nothing is more relaxing than sitting back with a pile of freshly-filed SEC documents and digging in. But two different filings this week—related to Visa/Square and Amex/Costco—may have raised a lot more questions than they answered. Read full story
The PF Space In Mexico: Salary Debit Cards The Key To The Future
The Mexican payment space is growing rapidly, but it's a country where cash still accounts for some 85 percent of all transactions. It's communities are cursed with large pockets of extreme poverty and banks are viewed with high suspicion. Read full story
The Bank ATM Deals With ApplePay Promise What NFC Needs: Normalcy
When the news hit recently that Bank of America and Wells Fargo were preparing to integrate Apple Pay into their ATMs—on top of an existing deal with Android Pay—it promised a healthy dose of what NFC wallets need more than anything else right now: Normalcy. Read full story
Will New Congressional Money Laundering Bill Make A Difference?
A pair of congressional bills were introduced on Wednesday (Feb. 3) with the stated goal of trying to make money laundering slightly more difficult. The tact of the bills simultaneously introduced in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate? To force people filing papers of incorporation to disclose all beneficial owners—and to hand over U.S. passport or state driver's license numbers for all of those beneficial owners. Read full story
Ford's Mobile Wallet TipToes Into IoT Payments
When Ford rolled out its mobile wallet this month, it took to heart the concept of contextual payments, focusing on paying for parking from within the vehicle as well as leasing alternative vehicles. But it's view of mobile was using a smartphone, rather than making the payments automobile-embedded. Although iPhones may weigh much less than two tons, few Apple Pay transactions will work at 80 MPH. Read full story
Can Starbucks Pull A Payments Pied Piper With Musical Mobile Money?
Starbucks is working with Spotify on a music deal, one where Starbucks customers will be able to easily download songs from the Starbucks playlist. Here's the hook: It's a backdoor route to more mobile payments. Read full story
Is TargetPay/WalmartPay A Return To Payments Yesteryear?
When word came out last month that Target was preparing its own mobile wallet app called TargetPay, which followed Walmart's confirmed Walmartpay, which itself followed the announcement of ChasePay, it started to feel as though the payments world was de-evolving into an earlier era. Read full story
MasterCard's Payments-Integrated Fridge Leaves Futurists Cold
When MasterCard used the Consumer Electronic Show on Tuesday (Jan. 5) to unveil its Groceries By MasterCard program, it was an all-too-common payments trend: the introduction of an interesting product with long-term potential, but with the initial version being so limited as to be almost pointless. Read full story
With Lyft Investment, Is GM Getting Out Of The Car Business Or Are Cars Getting Out Of The GM Business?
When Lyft announced on Monday (Jan. 4) that it had just closed a $1 billion round of funding—which included $500 million from General Motors—it struck some as puzzling. Why would an automaker like GM want a big chunk of a car-on-demand service? Did Toyota ever make a huge strategic invest in Yellow Cab? The answer lies in huge imminent changes within the car industry, as it inches its way from a product business to a service business. Read full story
Apple Envisions P2P In Every Possible Way
With Apple's P2P rollout and partnerships getting closer, it's not surprising that Apple was granted a Patent for the approach last month. But what was not expected was how inclusive and extensive Cupertino envisions P2P being, with the capability integrated into almost every iPhone function. Read full story
Just What The Payments Industry Needs: The Mike Tyson Digital Wallet
When Bitcoin Direct on Monday (Jan. 4) unveiled the Mike Tyson Digital Wallet, it was asking for trouble. You know it's a bad sign when your marketing move is so awful that Time Magazine can't resist making fun of it. Read full story
Washington State's Disappearing New Money Transmitter Rules
On Monday (Dec. 14), the Washington state Department of Financial Institutions said that it was about to change the ways payment processors can get waivers from money transmission licensing requirements. The changes were to kick in Jan. 1. But by Wednesday (Dec. 16), the page with the announcement had vanished, instead displaying a "page not found" error. A search on the state DFI site still returns the page during a search. (Guys, if you're going to hide a page, don't forget to clear cache and remove it from site search results. Geez, do we have to tell you everything about hiding stuff from the public?) Fortunately, we copied the text of the page before it disappeared. Read full story
Walmart Pay: For The Retailer Who's Given Up Trying To Get His Way
When Walmart last week introduced Walmart Pay, it was shown to be a simple app that would accept "any major payment type" but it would only work at Walmart. In short, it was the last thing that interchange-fee-hating Walmart wanted to do, especially in the mobile world. MCX's original vision, a merchant utopia where transactions were done in the non-interchange grab-the-money-directly-from-the-shopper's-bank-account universe and one app was used at thousands of different merchant stores, was Walmart's dream. Read full story
'Twas Two Months After Liability Shift And At Every Store, Not A Merchant Was Dipping, Not Even A.C. Moore
It's one of the payments industry's worst-kept secrets that EMV merchant acceptance has been nothing shy of dreadful and the reasons for that are many. But an intriguing survey by the independent ConsumerWorld has put some numbers and quite a few names on the naughty/nice list of EMV supporters. It seems that a liability shift these days can only get a cardbrand so far. Read full story
Deloitte: Ignorance Isn't Bliss. It's Killing Mobile Payments
On Wednesday (Dec. 9), Deloitte released a major mobile report and concluded that mobile payments is suffering from a payments industry self-inflicted wound: an almost criminal lack of shopper and store associate education about mobile payments. Read full story
Gift Cards Are Soaring. Keep Gifting, But For Heavens Sake, Stop Carding
A report released Tuesday (Dec. 8) projected U.S. gift card spend will hit $130 billion in 2015, an increase of more than six percent compared with last year. The stats from the ninth annual CEB TowerGroup report were hardly surprising, so why note it? Is it time the industry seriously considering changing the name of gift cards? Read full story
SamsungPay Admits It Won't Deliver Wearable Payments Until Next Year
Just what the world of mobile payments needs to boost consumer confidence: Missed delivery deadlines. In a Tweet reply to a consumer, SamsungMobile US has confirmed that SamsungPay didn't make its November '15 promised U.S. payment support for the wearable GearS2 smartwatch. The Tweet apologized for the delay—without explaining its cause—and promised that SamsungPay will happen "in 2016. Stay tuned for more information." Read full story
Amex Quietly Shuts Down Its Small Biz Saturday Credit Offers
For the last five years, American Express has championed its Small Business Saturday campaign the day after Black Friday, an attempt to get shoppers to refocus their attention on small local businesses. But this year, it quietly dropped a credit it gave to shoppers who participated (the amounts varied, but it was $30 last year). Read full story
RentMoola Deal Signals Major Upheaval In The Rental World
In the world of payment facilitators, it's hard to envision a segment more in need of payments updates than apartment rentals—one of the last nature preserves for the American Check. A deal announced on Tuesday (Dec. 1) between RentMoola and MasterCard is a very optimistic sign. Read full story
Payment Patent Potpouri: PayPal and MasterCard Get Creative On Authentication, Plus Can Thunder Predict Transactions?
The U.S. Patent Office has been busy approving some wacky payment ideas and we're going to periodically tell you about some of our favorites. The winners this week are two unrelated ideas on mobile-based authentication from PayPal and MasterCard—including the length of a shopper's finger, how they walk and bits of their voice conversations—plus a MasterCard idea on exploring weather-to-purchase correlations on an individualized basis. Read full story
MasterCard Survey Finds That Australians Prefer NFC Over Cash. But That's Not The Whole Story
In a survey that MasterCard commissioned in Australia, most participants said that they preferred contactless payments compared with cash. But the fineprint tells a different—and more perplexing—story. Read full story
Use Apple Pay, Get Free Rides On The London Underground
The only viable long-term way to get shoppers to change their preferred payments method is to give them a reason to do so. Whether that's a discount for using NFC rather than plastic or greenbacks, coupons/discounts that are only available using a specific payment method or some other perk, consumers need to get something concrete. This is the bulk of the message that MCX is screaming. Read full story
Court Of Appeals Speaks Up For The Payments Industry
When the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday (Nov. 30) slapped down the Cook County sheriff for trying to cut off payments on behalf of Backpage.com, the appellate court in effect set new rules for payment processors and card brands. The panel didn't voice an objection to Visa and MasterCard opting to cut off Backpage, but merely to a law enforcement agent trying to persuade—bully?—those businesses. Read full story
MC Makes Its Zero Liability Worldwide, In A Move That Visa Can't Yet Match
MasterCard on Wednesday (Nov. 11) globalized its zero liability policy, in effect delivering the kind of consistent worldwide shopper protection that Visa can not yet offer. But it will take MasterCard—which has been working on the policy change for a year—until as late as June 30, 2016, to support all regions, giving Visa time to react. Read full story
Home Depot Payment Card Fraud Via HR Records
In a big company, when it's suspected that someone is misusing company data to steal money from other employees, the first call is supposed to be to human resources. But what if the fraud is being perpetrated by a couple of HR staffers? That's what happened at Home Depot. Read full story
Visa: Huge Changes For Payments In IoT, Where Context Is King
The imminent Internet of Things (IoT) world—where every watch, car, thermostat, refrigerator, shopping cart and television talk with each other, and everything else—could have a huge impact on PF payments. But, as Jonathan Vaux, Visa's innovation director, recently said, it's really all about context. Read full story
Wall Street Vs. Silicon Valley: There's A New PF Lobbyist In Town
In a payment facilitator-focused fight that could be painted as Wall Street lobbyists against Silicon Valley lobbyists, a tech group—consisting of Amazon, Apple, Google, Intuit and PayPal—has created a payments lobbying group solely designed to counter the influence of traditional financial players, including Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Chase and Citibank. The group announced its formation on Tuesday (Nov. 3). Read full story
Why Home Improvement Chains Make The Most Natural PFs
One of the most natural places for a payment facilitator is within a do-it-yourself home improvement chain. The chains already attract plumbers, electricians, masons and every other kind of contractor, almost all of whom have to sell their services—in effect, reselling that chain's products in something akin to a value-added reseller (VAR)—to consumers. Most importantly, those consumers want convenient ways to pay, which is rarely something contractors offer—but the home improvement chains but are interacting with does. Read full story
Can Candor And A Payments Card Launch Co-Exist?
Even in payments, a little candor can go a long way, especially in public CEO statements about issuing a new kind of payments card. This comes from a British company called Mondo, which is about generate MasterCard Prepaid Debit cards issued by Wirecard Card Solutions, which is a payment facilitator as well as being a prepaid issuer. Read full story
Amazon Shuts Down Local Register, Having Never Really Loved It Anyway
For the world's largest e-commerce company, Amazon certainly had a busy payments week this week, from opening a physical bookstore integrating online capabilities to pushing its Amazon button for third-party mobile apps. But it's most PF noteworthy move this week was Amazon's choice to give up on Local Register. Read full story
MCX Finally Gets Its Interchange Break—After Chase Hands It To Them
When JPMorgan Chase on Monday (Oct. 26) promised new mobile capabilities for its online Chase Pay program next summer, it chose to take a decidedly retailer-oriented approach. With the lures of lower interchange fees plus all of the fraud cost protections of the EMV liability shift without having to accept EMV, Chase has given retailers concrete reasons to push Chase Pay over other payment methods. Read full story
The Non-Intuitive World Of Authentication And Social Media
A cyberthief walks into a bank branch, fully prepared to impersonate his intended high-net-worth victim. Not only is he equipped with fake IDs in the victim's name, lots of personal information courtesy of social and search engine research, but the thief has even taken the precaution of breaking into his victim's social accounts and replacing his thief-like face for the victim's on the victim's own social sites. If anyone tries to check on the Facebook or LinkedIn site of the victim, the thief's face would be confirmed. Read full story
Why Did Most Merchants Miss The EMV Deadline? Many Reasons, But Complexity Is The Top
With the liability shift and October already here, where are all the EMV-compliant merchants? Many are still waiting for software updates. And why is that, given how many years everyone has known about the October 2015 cutover? Seems that the U.S. payments processing space is a lot more complicated than even the payment itself realized, according to Randy Vanderhoof, who, as executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, is the industry's chief EMV cheerleader. Read full story
Apple Pay Penetration Stats: The Less We Know, The Better It Is
Although there is no question today that mobile payments are increasing, to what degree is challenging. This confusion was magnified this month when Bloomberg quoted the Aite Group as saying that ApplePay accounts for one percent of all U.S. retail transactions. Read full story
