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- Payments Industry 101: This report can serve as a guide to understanding the landscape of the U.S. payments industry. This material, expertly curated by TSG Associates, provides excellent coverage of the payments ecosystem and the industry’s opportunity, as well as valuable insights into merchant acquiring, credit card issuing, and general industry trends. Seasoned executives, and newcomers alike, will find substantial value in the contents. Preview | Purchase
- EMV Merchant Planning and Strategy Guide: This report (76 pages of detailed information) can act as a strategic tool at higher levels within your organization or can be leveraged to educate and arm front-line personnel such as sales teams when visiting clients who may be encountering EMV issues or be planning to migrate to EMV. Preview | Purchase
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 The Mastercard in your wallet just expired. You can still use it—but it doesn’t look right anymore, because the company just revamped its look. No more CamelCase; it’s just “Mastercard” now (and in some cases “mastercard,” but we’ll get to that).
The logo still has the overlapping red and yellow circles and sans-serif font, but all the elements are slimmer, flatter, less fussy. You might be thinking: Why bother? You’re one of more than 2.3 billion people who carry the company’s cards, and in Mastercard’s internal tests, more than 80 percent of survey participants identified those circles as its brand.
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Shoppers have a lot more decisions to make if they want to pay with a phone in the checkout line. More banks and merchants are developing mobile-payment products for use in stores, joining the likes of Apple Inc. that have dominated the nascent business. The result is a dizzying range of options for shoppers who must decide which method to use if they want to pay with their phones instead of using traditional plastic cards. What is unclear is whether more choice will make people more eager to embrace smartphone payments or hold back the emerging technology.
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Retailers who have changed over to the chip-and-PIN terminals are fighting back against the card issuers and filing lawsuits to make transactions more secure. Home Depot, the Atlanta-based home improvement retailer, filed a federal lawsuit this month accusing Visa and MasterCard, two credit card issuers, of hindering the retailer's efforts to boost the security of the new chip cards. In their lawsuit, the company claims that the card issuers are not giving retailers the option to offer more secure transactions where consumers have to use their PIN, a four digit code instead of a basic signature.
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Will large retailers get burned by delaying compliance? Low-risk merchants may not be. But some merchants who were previously considered a low fraud risk may start seeing more fraudulent transactions as thieves start to see them as a window of opportunity. With big-box and electronics stores largely EMV compliant, thieves, Drieling says, have started to jump to once lower-risk places like grocery stores – which, according to our survey, are mostly not EMV-ready .“There’s a big black market for baby formula, for example,” Drieling says. The profit margins of supermarkets are already razor thin, meaning footing the bill for fraudulent purchases “is probably starting to eat into their profitability,” Drieling says.
Related: EMV in the US: Where Have We Gotten?
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JPMorgan Chase kicked off bank earnings season Thursday by topping second-quarter estimates with a profit of $1.55 per share, compared to estimates of $1.43 a share, sending shares higher in trading. The bank also reported better-than-expected revenue of $25.2 billion. Investors are closely watching U.S. bank earnings to see if their performance in the second quarter avoided pain from turbulence in the European Union and other factors that have hampered Wall Street banks this year.
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The Chinese government likely hacked computers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2010, 2011 and 2013 and employees at the U.S. banking regulator covered up the intrusions, according to a congressional report on Wednesday. The report cited an internal FDIC investigation as identifying Beijing as the likely perpetrator of the attacks, which the probe said were covered up to protect the job of FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg, who was nominated for his post in 2011.
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There are a lot of things we’ve come to expect when we buy a package of Girl Scout cookies: the joy of knowing we’re supporting troupes of 10-year-olds, the addictive crumble of a Thin Mint. But most of us don’t expect to be asked for a tip. Yet that’s what happened when personal finance writer Nicole Dieker used her credit card to pay for cookies with a mobile-payments system. The awkward situation will sound familiar to those who’ve used Square.
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If you’re a criminal looking to commit credit card fraud, the most popular way to successfully make that happen today is to create a counterfeit card and use it in an in-store purchase. Cha-ching. Free Stuff. “Counterfeit cards are still the number one form of card fraud in stores in the U.S. today,” explains Jason Oxman, CEO of Electronic Transaction Association, the trade association of the payments industry. “These are fake cards that are created by criminals using stolen account numbers.”
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A judge ruled in favor of Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price on all counts today in a suit filed against him last year by his brother and business partner, Lucas Price — capping, at least for now, a hard-fought legal dispute between the owners of a Seattle-based company known for raising its minimum salaries to $70,000 a year.
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Declines can present short-term and long-term problems for merchants reliant on recurring payments, Burkhart tells Digital Transactions News. Many times, the merchant pays little attention to the type of declines it receives from its processor, he says. “The first step is to raise their awareness about what’s happening at the transaction level,” Burkhart says. “Often times, companies don’t associate declines with losing a customer. They don’t necessarily connect the dots.”
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In the latest contactless payments development for the Rio Olympics, Visa has partnered with Swatch to introduce an NFC-enabled watch in Brazil, enabling consumers to pre-load funds into their associated bank accounts and make a purchase within seconds. Visa is following up its recently released NFC payments ring and Bradesco payment band with the rollout of the Swatch Bellamy watch, highlighting the financial institution’s ongoing dedication to fueling wearable adoption among the masses. The Bellamy watches can now be purchased by Brazilian consumers seeking to save time during their shopping trips.
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The Pokémon Company, with video-game maker Nintendo as one of its primary investors, last week released its free-to-play augmented reality mobile game in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. Pokémon Go has a grip on these nations as millions of people roam their neighborhoods to "catch" virtual Pokémon. And while the game has experienced server issues since its debut, players love it. As a result, Nintendo is a hot company.
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Google will provide McDonald's customers in San Jose, Calif., this weekend with free burgers as a promotion for its Hands Free payment app at any of 47 participating restaurants. To use the Hands Free system, users tell the cashier, "I'll pay with Google," and the cashier confirms the payment through a photo of the customer displayed on the register screen.
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As part of its continuous investments to deliver an exceptional customer experience in China, Starbucks announced the launch of the Starbucks mobile payment experience aimed at providing My Starbucks Rewards® (MSR) members access to a fast, seamless and convenient way to pay for purchases, using their pre-loaded Starbucks Gift Card, at more than 2,200 stores nationwide, via their mobile devices.
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At the end of 2014, everyone was telling programmer Felix Weis that Bitcoin was dead. “I knew it wasn’t true because I used Bitcoin at least once a week in Berlin,” he recalls. (Though originally from Luxembourg, he had been living there for two years.) After hearing about Bitcoin back in 2012, he had since founded a Bitcoin coworking space but there were too few Bitcoin companies to keep it afloat. He was also active in the Bitcoin forums and had written a Python library for Bitcoin.
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SolidX Partners Inc., a U.S. technology company that provides blockchain services, this week filed an application with the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch an exchange-traded product that tracks the price of bitcoin. Blockchain is the technology that powers bitcoin, the digital currency. SolidX provides blockchain-based software relating to the recording of digital records, transfer of assets, and identity, according to its website.
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It hasn’t been even two weeks since the death of CurrentC and Walmart’s Wednesday announcement looks like an additional kick to the barely-breathing body of MCX. The second largest retailer in the world announced the nationwide rollout of its mobile payment solution, Walmart Pay, in the US. Over the past few months, Walmart has been gradually rolling out its proprietary payment solution across the states and made an announcement on June 6 that Walmart Pay is now available in more than 4,600 Walmart stores nationwide and works with any credit, debit, prepaid or Walmart gift card that is linked to the Walmart app.
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The Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC), representing more than 12,000 credit unions and community banks, trade associations, payment card networks and banks, submitted comments supporting the repeal of the Durbin Amendment in the Financial CHOICE Act. Commending Chairman Hensarling for his leadership in addressing the overly burdensome and unfair price controls introduced by the Durbin Amendment, the EPC stated that the Durbin Amendment failed to deliver on its key promise, which was savings for consumers.
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Omni Hotels & Resorts warns customers that hackers infiltrated its networks and for six months used point-of-sale malware to siphon off payment card data. In a July 8 notice posted on its website, the Dallas-based luxury hotel chain said that it first learned of the data breach on May 30; it doesn't say how. Related malware infections began at some properties on Dec. 23, 2015, and lasted up to June 14, the hotel says.
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Bankers are often told that as long as they take the right precautions, the marijuana business no longer needs to be off-limits. Still, this once-illicit, rapidly growing market continues to carry clear risks for the banking industry. Millennium Bank, a $75 million-asset institution in Des Plaines, Ill., recently learned this lesson the hard way. Illinois legalized medical marijuana in January 2014, and Millennium was one of a small number of banks that showed interest in serving the state's nascent pot sector, sources told American Banker.
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U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday that the U.S. government has to improve its cyber security practices for the modern age of smart phones and other technology, saying that hackers had targeted the White House. "I am concerned about it, I don't think we have it perfect. We have to do better, we have to learn from mistakes," Obama told a news conference in Madrid. "We know that we have had hackers in the White House," he added.
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The Electronic Funds Transfer Association (EFTA), which works to advance electronic payments and commerce through responsible federal government relations, today released, “User Authentication for Payments,” a white paper and free resource for the payments industry. As an association that represents large financial institutions, payment processors, software companies, card companies and ATM networks, the EFTA has prepared this white paper to address the importance of user authentication for all stakeholders in the payments industry.
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The lawsuit concerned interchange fees that are charged when credit or debit cards are used. The lawsuit alleged that the default fees set up by MasterCard were too high. The judge agreed, writing that merchants have little options except to accept cards from all card issuers, leaving MasterCard with the power to set unilateral rates that are higher than they would otherwise be if MasterCard had negotiated. The judge wrote that a merchant who considered the default rate too high would be left with "unattractive alternatives" such as complaining, refusing to accept cards and charging card users a surcharge.
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ETA | 7.13.16
“ETA applauds the House Financial Services Committee for their leadership on this issue which is critical to expanding access to credit to our nation’s small business owners. We are proud to have ETA member company CAN Capital testify on behalf of the industry at this hearing. Access to credit is the lifeblood of small businesses and a major determinant of their success or failure. Small businesses drive the economic growth of our nation, employing about half of private sector workers and generating more than $6 trillion in annual revenue.
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If you’re unsure how much of your organization’s strategic assets may be intimately tied up with all this technology stuff, ask yourself what would be of special worth to a network intruder. Here’s a look at some of the key corporate assets that may be of interest and value to modern bad guys.
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U.S. retail sales posted a healthy gain in June, a sign of sturdy consumer spending this spring that should bolster broader economic growth headed into the second half of the year. Sales at retail stores and restaurants rose 0.6% in June from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted $456.98 billion, the Commerce Department said Friday. Sales had climbed 0.2% in May, revised down from an earlier estimate of 0.5% growth.
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Small businesses and middle market companies in the U.S. are in growth mode, according to the American Express Business Growth Pulse. The survey found that ninety-two percent of middle market firms ($10M -$1B in revenues) and eighty percent of small businesses (with less than 100 employees and at least $250,000 in revenue) say growth is the top priority for their firms. A greater number of middle market companies anticipate their businesses to grow in the next quarter, with more than one-in-five of these firms (22% vs. 7% of small businesses) saying they expect their companies will be “expanding by leaps and bounds.”
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Yesterday’s checkout glitches didn’t impact Amazon’s ability to pull off another successful Prime Day sales event, as it turns out. The online retailer announced this morning, without giving specific figures, that its Prime Day 2016 was the “biggest ever.” Not just in terms of other Prime Days, either, but the “biggest day in the history of Amazon.” Tuesday’s customer orders were up by more than 60 percent worldwide, compared with last year’s Prime Day, and up by more than 50 percent in the U.S.
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In an important industry milestone, Mastercard unveiled the foundation for the future of commerce with the new Masterpass global digital payment service. This enhanced solution enables consumers to look no further than their own trusted bank or credit union to make fast, simple and secure digital payments – across devices and channels – anywhere they want to shop be it online, in app and now in-store with contactless. Mastercard is the first network to deliver an omni-channel, all-digital payment service for consumers, issuers and merchants leveraging the most advanced methods of payment security available today.
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Early Warning, the industry leader in real-time payments, authentication and risk mitigation, announced that Capital One, Chase and Wells Fargo are offering real-time payments through their person-to-person (P2P) service on Early Warning’s clearXchange network, the largest bank-led digital payments network in the United States. The banks join Bank of America and U.S. Bank as the latest financial institutions to launch real-time payments on Early Warning’s clearXchange network.
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Star Micronics, a leading POS and customer engagement technology manufacturer, with more than 30 years providing proof of purchase expertise, today announced an integration with Apriva, a leading player in secure mobile communications and wireless payment processing, to incorporate support for Star Micronics' TSP650II BTi desktop printer, and the SM-S220i and SM-S230i portable printers into Apriva's white-labeled mobile payments application, AprivaPay Plus™.
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TSYS announced that Lloyds Banking Group, the UK's leading provider of current accounts, savings, personal loans, credit cards and mortgages, has renewed its agreement with TSYS to continue to process the bank’s UK commercial card portfolio. Lloyds Banking Group was formed in January 2009, and has the largest private shareholder base in the UK. The group has more than 30 million customers and approximately 75,000 employees.
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POS Portal, a leading distributor of secure payment devices, announced today that it has joined the PCI Security Standards Council as a new Participating Organization. POS Portal will work with the Council to achieve and improve payment data security worldwide through the ongoing development of the PCI Security Standards, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), PIN Transaction Security (PTS) requirements and the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS).
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Apriva, the leading provider of secure end-to-end wireless transaction processing solutions, today announced it has completed an additional EMV certification for its AprivaPay™ Plus application on First Data’s Nashville platform. This is the third certification for Apriva’s white labeled mobile payments solution, making AprivaPay Plus one of the most comprehensively certified mobile solutions available today.
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FIS Cardless Cash, the market-leading mobile solution that avoids using a plastic card at the ATM to withdraw funds, will expand across the United States thanks to a new partnership between FIS, a global leader in financial services technology, and Payment Alliance International (PAI), the nation’s largest, privately-held provider of ATM processing and maintenance services, ATM equipment sales and support.
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Yahoo! Finance | 7.14.16
Citi announced the formation of the Citi® ATM Community Network, a new pilot program providing more than 300,000 customers of participating minority-owned banks and credit unions with the ability to withdraw cash with no surcharge fee at Citibank® branch ATMs including those in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C.
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Fifth Third Bank will offer its customers access to more than 45,000 fee-free ATMs nationwide beginning this month as it joins the Allpoint® ATM network. Allpoint®, the world’s largest surcharge-free ATM network, will add 43,000 new ATM locations across the country to Fifth Third customers. Fifth Third has 2,500 ATMs and partners with grocery store chain Publix for another 1,100 ATMs.
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Clearent announced that Chris Knibb has joined the payment processing company as its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Knibb joins Clearent from Express Scripts, a Fortune 22 pharmacy benefit management company, where he was Vice President of Financial Planning Analysis. With more than 20 years of financial leadership experience, ranging from a technology start-up to a $100 billion revenue organization, Knibb is well positioned to make an immediate impact at Clearent.
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Huntington Bancshares and Akron-based FirstMerit have agreed to sell 13 branch offices in northeast Ohio to resolve antitrust concerns over Huntington's plan to buy FirstMerit, according to the Justice Department. The banks will sell two offices in Ashtabula County and 11 in Stark County in the Canton area. The offices have deposits of $737.8 million.
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First Data, a global leader in commerce-enabling technology and solutions, and Ingenico Group, the global leader in seamless payment, today announced that First Data is now offering a new payment acceptance solution leveraging Ingenico Group’s smart terminals that supports EMV tip adjust and Common AID. First Data has Class B+ certified this new solution on its Omaha Platform.
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Berlin-based Cringle will use SolarisBank’s banking licence and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) access API to roll out its wallet-less mobile payment solution. Cringle says the SEPA-based approach allows it (with SolarisBank’s help) to “move and scale quickly on a European level”. Joschka Friedag, CEO of Cringle, says: “While others have seen SEPA as burden, we have always seen it as an opportunity to build great products. It will be hard for purely national solutions to survive in the globalised fintech ecosystem.”
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Grubhub, the nation's leading online and mobile food-ordering and delivery platform, today announced the availability of a new payment option for its customers. Grubhub and Seamless diners can now pay for delivery or takeout orders placed via their Android app using Android Pay. Android Pay is easy to use, and offers Grubhub and Seamless customers another secure option for mobile payment. Diners can simply select Android Pay at checkout, and have their food delivered from any of their favorite local restaurants.
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ICBA Bancard®, the payments-services subsidiary of the Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA), named Chrystina Giorgio as president and CEO. She was appointed by unanimous decision of ICBA Bancard’s board of directors and succeeds Linda Echard, who served for 30 years as president and CEO and retired in June.
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