Last week’s federal court rejection of a 4-year-old $5.7 billion interchange fee settlement has retailers applauding, and Visa and MasterCard gearing up for what could be years of ongoing ligation and perhaps a stop at the Supreme Court.
The U.K.’s historic decision to exit the European Union (or Brexit) last month has left many businesses speculating what the ramifications will be for them, especially e-money issuers based in the U.K. that have licenses that they passport to EU countries. Neopay, a U.K.-based e-money and payment regulatory consultancy, is hoping to assuage the jitters of new and established e-money companies in Europe with Brexit Insurance.
In a pair of legal battles that could have a ripple effect into the payments and retail sectors, Facebook and Google have invoked a recent Supreme Court decision and the U.S. Constitution to defend against claims that the companies’ facial recognition systems violate a key state biometric privacy law.
Indian payment solutions provider ItzCash Card Ltd. has received in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to participate in the country’s integrated bill payments platform, known as the Bharat Bill Payments System (BBPS).
There are three options of a road ahead for the payments industry players: 1) to carry on as they are and watch their margins erode; 2) to transform into a utility; 3) to have a long hard look at their value chain. If you choose the latter – what do you see, asks Sapient Global Markets’ Leda […]
Woman In Technology (W.I.T) Award recognises an outstanding contribution made by a female to the fintech industry. The W.I.T. Award celebrates the spirit of inclusion, diversity and creativity in the fintech industry Supported by a worldwide network of FemTechLeaders To be presented at the Banking Technology annual awards ceremony and gala dinner on 1 December. […]
Visa has filed a lawsuit against Walmart in a dispute over customers’ use of signatures or PINs to verify purchases with EMV-equipped debit cards at Walmart. Last month, Walmart sued Visa, claiming the payments network required the retailer to offer EMV debit users the option of signature or PIN verification in violation of the Durbin Amendment.
That would provide some long-awaited certainty to financial service providers and tech companies like Google and Facebook that handle consumers’ personal information.
U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) are demanding answers from Green Dot, MasterCard and Walmart about a May outage that left Green Dot-issued Walmart MoneyCard customers without access to certain prepaid services. The senators also asked MasterCard to distinguish the circumstances between the Green Dot outage and the one RushCard experienced October 2015 when it switched to MasterCard’s processing platform.
First filed in 2011 by a consortium of consumers, independent ATM operators and the National ATM Council, the suit alleges that payment networks’ ATM fee policies suppressed competition by barring ATM operators from offering discounts to users who transact via networks other than MasterCard or Visa.
In fiscal year 2015, 98 percent of the $3.98 trillion remitted to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Services came through electronic payments.
This great infographics, created by BTC Media, maps out the bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem of 2016 – it is a crowded metropolis! Click on the image to enlarge. Source: BTC Media, LLC
The people have decided and the U.K. is splitting from the European Union, raising serious concerns for the payments industry. Among those concerns is how passporting will work when the U.K. is no longer part of the EU since the majority of European e-money issuers have licenses in the U.K. that they passport elsewhere. Fifty-two percent of voters opted to bow out, or “Brexit,” as it’s commonly called.
As voters head to polling places today to decide whether the U.K. should split from the European Union, the referendum is top of mind for members of the payments industry around the world. Several issues for the industry would be in flux should the U.K. decide to bow out, or “Brexit,” as it’s commonly called.
Canada’s open-loop prepaid market saw CAD$3.1 billion (US$2.4 billion) in total card loads in 2015, according to a new market-sizing report offering insights into the country’s fast-growing prepaid industry.
This nifty infographics, courtesy of MBNA, is a whistle-stop tour of credit wonder and woe over the last 4,000 years – from ancient Babylon to modern Britain – and what people had to do to get a little credit.
Today, 20 June, sees the England-Slovakia game of the 2016 UEFA European Championship in France. In the spirit of that football tournament, PPRO has created an e-commerce guide to these two countries. Click here to see all the countries: Euro 2016
Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin says state law enforcement will delay using devices that read the magnetic stripes on payment cards, following outcries from lawmakers and consumer groups about privacy and legal concerns. But mention of a supplemental proposed rulemaking suggests FinCEN may be looking to revisit card readers at the border.
CPI Card Group has been targeted in a new class action lawsuit over claims the card manufacturing and fulfillment specialist failed to disclose important information to shareholders in the run-up to its IPO last year.
For more than a year, payroll card providers have had to deal with the specter of a final rule on payroll card regulations from the New York Department of Labor. The wait is now over, sort of. Rather than issue a final rule, the N.Y. DOL today issued a second revision to its proposal, but the industry is still concerned about its implications.
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations recently approved its Fiscal Year 2017 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Bill, and its passage (30-17) most definitely represents a thorn in the side of the CFPB because it delays the bureau’s regulations for payday loans.
This truly has been the time of regulators announcing fintech sandboxes – what better thing to write about on my first fintech column here, than the ways regulators and fintechs can work together! There were three announcements in the past couple of weeks around regulatory sandboxes – the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) announced […]
The CFPB wants to make more consumers aware of its watchdog mission and is spending big to ensure that: $15.3 million so far in fiscal 2016, making the federal agency among the biggest government advertisers, according to reports and an online database.
It’s been more than a year since the New York Department of Labor first proposed payroll card regulations, but the agency is expected to follow up with a new payroll card rulemaking in the New York State Register this week. What’s uncertain is whether the regulations will be final or if the state will be following up its controversial proposal with a revised proposed rulemaking for which it will accept additional comments.
Since 2015 the fintech market has changed dramatically but even bigger changes are yet to come in 2016 affecting financial services big time, believes Francisco Lorca, MD of a London-based fintech accelerator programme, Startupbootcamp. Tech is coming for banking as more fintech start-ups are springing up. There still huge gap between the collaboration of these two but […]
The banks know they need to do better for their millions of UK customers, but the pressing question is how? One answer is to form partnerships with some of the fintech companies that are now gathering momentum as powerful players in the market. Can these potential competitors be the banks new best friends? Jurgen Hutter, […]
FIS has published its third annual report, Flavors of Fast, which shows via infographics the growth in the number of real-time payment initatives and usage volumes. Warren Gardiner, VP strategy enterprise payments, FIS, says: “Context is everything: speed without context is just faster; creating context without open data mining is merely an improvement. Speed, context […]
A less powerful CFPB and looser caps on card interchange fees: Those are among the potential features of a bill that Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) plans to introduce later this month that would overturn major provisions of the Dodd-Frank act.
Chase faces a class-action suit filed in federal court this week that alleges the bank’s debit card program for prisoners locks them in a cycle of fees upon their release.
As we enter a new era in global tax reporting with increasing regulations around tax transparency, Banking Technology and Thomson Reuters have gathered industry views from across the globe to piece together a full picture on the financial market’s readiness for the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) and continued approach to the Foreign Account Tax Compliance […]
National restaurant chain O’Charley’s announced it suffered a security breach that may have exposed diners’ payment card information during a three-week period starting in mid-March.
Will everyone really benefit from the real-time payments coming to the US? Can the US regulator mandate the banking sector to adopt it? And what are the chances of this new faster payments system becoming ubiquitous? Banking Technology digs deeper, past the hype. It’s a pretty safe bet that the roll-out of faster payments in […]
Members of the financial services industry have launched a media campaign in support of a bill they say would provide better protection of consumer data, bring retailer accountability for data breaches in line with the financial sector and supersede myriad state laws pertaining to breach-notification regulations.
The theft earlier this year of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Federal Reserve has caught the attention of more Congressional investigators. The chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), has given New York Federal Reserve officials until June 14 to turn over documents related to the incident.
It’s difficult to avoid writing about distributed ledger technologies, so we won’t. Last month Australian Craig Wright claimed to be the elusive inventor of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. Displaying uncharacteristic scepticism, many mainstream media outlets doubted his claims. Whether it’s true or not, the story attracted great interest. Distributed ledger, blockchain (some argue the two are […]
Recent media reports that prepaid cards have “hidden fees” simply because card packaging doesn’t follow the format contained in the CFPB’s proposed prepaid accounts rule are misleading and misinformed. Of course, the industry is waiting for the final rule before making standardized disclosure changes.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS), striving to overcome inefficiencies and profitability that’s historically been much more often in the red than in the black, is exploring the use of blockchain technology to improve current services, provide new services and improve operations.
Greed, gluttony, anger, envy and more. The seven deadly sins of quantitative data analysts put into a nifty graphics, courtesy of Quandl.
A settlement agreement has been reached from a 2014 data breach between Kmart and several banks.
The 2013 Target data breach settlement has been finalized.
