Visa announced a number of interesting statistics regarding the progress of EMV adoption in the U.S.: Nearly 327 million Visa chip cards have been issued, roughly 58% of them credit cards and the remainder debit/stored-value. The U.S. has quickly become the largest chip card market globally, followed by Brazil at 141 million and the UK [...]
PayPal and Visa announced several new initiatives as part of a partnership deal aimed at thawing their historically frosty relationship. PayPal will de-emphasize its focus on steering customers to bank transfers instead of Visa cards to fund transactions, integrate Visa's mobile payments platform, provide more transaction data to card issuers, and allow Visa's debit cardholders [...]
In May, I published an article "Are Americans too dumb for Credit Card PINs?" pointing out the absurdity of U.S. card network rules requiring a merchant to accept a cardholder signature as authentication on an EMV-chip enabled card transaction, rather than requiring the customer to enter a PIN like 80+ other countries. By forcing merchants to [...]
Visa published a report predicting robust growth in international travel and associated spend over the next decade. Highlights: 282 million households will plan at least one international trip per year by 2025, up 35% from current levels. Average spend will exceed $5,000 per trip Largest growth will come from markets with an expanding "traveling class" such as [...]
After more than ten years of lobbying by MasterCard, Visa and others, China issued new regulations on June 7 which will allow foreign payment networks access to China's $8+ trillion payments market, previously dominated by a near-monopoly of China Union Pay, which is government-run. Card issuers will still be required to operate locally, and China's [...]
At a recent JPMorgan tech conference, Visa's CEO Charlie Scharf basically admitted that Visa has a "love/hate" relationship with PayPal. I too admit, when I was running Discover's merchant network, I felt the same way. On one hand, PayPal generates substantial volume for the card networks, although it's not clear how much of that, if [...]
Walmart has filed a lawsuit against Visa related to Visa's policy requiring merchants to allow cardholders to choose whether to enter a PIN for debit transactions, even if the customer uses a chip-enabled card. The problem? Signature-based debit transactions are processed on Visa's debit network, often at a higher fee to the merchant than other network routing [...]
One of the biggest EMV-related complaints from consumers and merchants alike has been the slowdown at the point of sale. Those added seconds decrease customer satisfaction and slow down the checkout process, thereby creating significant added expense for high volume merchants. The updated technology from Visa, known as Quick Chip for EMV, speeds up [...]
