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 [...]
With the June 19 deadline looming for Costco to stop accepting American Express cards, it's interesting that American Express announced a change to its policy regarding annual fee refunds. Previously, American Express provided a pro-rated refund of its annual fee upon account closure. The recently announced new policy is: "Closing your Account Effective September 1, [...]
PayPal is suspending its operations in Turkey after it was refused regulatory approval. Immediately after PayPal's announcement, competitor Stripe began an effort to sign up merchants who were orphaned by PayPal's decision. Apparently Stripe is pushing its "Atlas" program, which promises to establish a U.S. business entity for Turkish merchants for $500. But it isn't that [...]
MasterCard reported an impressive 27% year-over-year reduction in counterfeit card fraud at EMV chip-enabled merchants. That doesn't mean merchants are seeing the benefits of those reductions. In May, I blogged about the sharp rise in chargebacks that merchants are experiencing due to the liability shift that occurred last October, whereby merchants can be charged back without [...]
MySpace announced this week that it was the target of a data hack, potentially involving 360 million accounts and over 400 million passwords. (Editorial comment: who knew that MySpace was still that relevant?) Most of the hacked credentials were created before 2013, giving some hope that the passwords are stale because they have been changed [...]
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 [...]
MasterCard announced a new platform to help small to medium sized online businesses combat fraud. The platform is called Simplify Controls and it provides the ability for merchants to set their own risk tolerances including transaction amount limit, geo-location of the buyer, and multiple sales. It also incorporates Kount's fraud monitoring engine which analyzes hundreds of [...]
MasterCard announced a pilot with Pizza Hut and SoftBank Robotics to deploy humanoid-type robots to take orders and process payments at some Pizza Hut locations in Asia. The robots have a low price point of about $1600 and can react to emotion cues from humans. I wonder if it will be eligible for minimum wage? [...]
I am currently in Orlando at the Card Not Present Expo to moderate a session on cross-border ecommerce. Hundreds of people are here from around the world to talk about what's next in payments. We had a great discussion this session with ecommerce industry leaders. Here's a summary from the CardNotPresent.com site. Sign up to [...]
This article from Huffington Post tells a fascinating story about farmers in small Ugandan villages embracing digit wallets as a replacement for cash boxes and paper records to manage their community savings and lending groups. Benefits go beyond safety and efficiency... there is also greater transparency and access to bankers and other institutions who can provide access to other resources. [...]
