Richard Mitchell

Prepaid debit cards are becoming an increasingly popular payment device for states. And one of the largest acquirers of government tax payments now wants a piece of the prepaid card transaction pie.

The accepted wisdom is that smaller merchant processors cannot compete with such giants as First Data Corp. or Vital Processing Services LLC and that acquirers are better off letting the big boys process their transactions. Ronald R. Nation doesn't buy it.

The robust debit card is strengthening its grip on the evolving U.S. payments sector.

An obscure but key player in point-of-sale payments, TNS Inc. is on its own again after surviving the Internet bust. What's TNS' strategy in an increasingly global and competitive market?

Growth rates in electronic check transactions at the point of sale are slowing down. While many opportunities remain, the rapidly changing market's future is anything but certain.

The debit card world, already trying to recover from bruising interchange fights with retailers, could soon face another operational jolt.

After engineering a boom in consumer debit and prepaid programs in recent years, card companies, processors and issuers also are working to bolster their product offerings in the business-to-business sector.

The automated teller machine, once one of the financial industry's most reliable moneymakers, is undergoing a metamorphosis. An ATM deployment boom beginning in the late 1990s by banks, credit unions and independent sales organizations looking to ride the surcharge wave literally turned terminals into cash machines for their owners.

The settlements Visa and MasterCard struck with merchants last year by no means ended the feuds between the associations and retailers. Several merchants opted out of the class action in hopes of getting better deals on their own. CCM assesses their prospects.

Their pricing power is under attack, American Express is luring banks, and processors threaten to siphon card transactions. Can Visa and MasterCard meet the challenges? Here, CCM and Card Technology assess the U.S. situation.

Government agencies are getting on board with card payments, but acquirers still face some of the same problems they encountered when they began to crack the market more than a decade ago.

Few industries have more at stake in their choice of transaction-processing technologies than gaming. To flourish in the hyper-competitive, $42 billion sector-which is supported by millions of annual credit and debit card payments initiated by gamblers at hundreds of casinos across the United States-it is essential that casinos offer customers the quickest and most convenient means of accessing cash. Casinos also must make accurate, split-second decisions on the creditworthiness of gamblers.

Lower interchange, new freedom for merchants to choose card brands, and other changes have caused the old world of debit cards to go up in flames. What will the new world look like?

The effects of the groundbreaking Visa/MasterCard settlements over offline debit card interchange are just beginning to be felt. How will signature- and PIN-based cards be affected, and will merchants dare to drop Visa and MasterCard debit cards?

Bit by bit, terminal makers, software developers and processors are rolling out services that might persuade reluctant merchants to trade in their old, but functioning, POS terminals.