Opinions

The other morning I was at the counter of the local UPS store notarizing a document when I was shocked by a comment by a woman standing nearby. This nationwide franchise provides post office boxes, packing, shipping, copying and many other individual and business-related services through 4,700 convenient small corner or mini-mall stores. My head snapped as she told the clerk, "I would like to make a deposit." At first I thought she was making a deposit for a purchase or on a bill or perhaps depositing a package of goods for shipping.

Until the mid 1980s, most fraud went undiagnosed or misreported. The debate today seems to be whether the increasing digital landscape ends up increasing or decreasing fraud overall.

A successful payment network would unite banks under a large and trusted external corporation in order to more simply and transparently tackle currently complex financial supply chains.

Suddenly, it seems like almost everyone is offering a mobile wallet. Major issuers, telco consortiums, search engines and other third-party intermediaries are clamoring for attention.

There are several factors that Bank of America's managers must have known when they recently started testing a new fee schedule for consumers.

They won’t go cold turkey. Surprisingly, the more purchases consumers pay for with debit, the more cash they withdraw. Use ATM screens to get the word out about debit’s benefits.

U.S. bankers and telecom providers seeking to crack the code on how to successfully implement and accelerate mobile payments can take a lesson from their peers in Kenya. This country is at the forefront of a mobile banking revolution that is empowering its citizens and opening up new lines of commerce.

Competition between Amex, Discover, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa is fierce and intensifying. What would Facebook's angle be if it aspired to build a broader payments business?

With new channels and services, I've often thought that consumers don't care as much about security as they claim to — but they do care about reliability. So I was surprised to see that Citi blamed a recent payment problem on the coding of its iPad app when the problem has occurred in other channels.

Several billion consumers and 35 million merchants worldwide take the enormous convenience and security of branded payment cards for granted.