Finance

Democratic lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren today demanded that eight U.S. banks produce information about agreements they may have with colleges to encourage students to use their products.

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. won a tentative court ruling they don’t infringe a patent owned by SmartMetric Inc., a technology development company that seeks $13.4 billion in damages.

The latest revelations about the National Security Agency confirmed what many in the payments industry had long suspected: the agency is watching electronic transactions along with communications.

California’s legislature has voted to reform a money-transmission law that has come under fire for stymying payments innovation.

The recent court ruling on debit interchange fees should remind the payments industry how harmful the Durbin amendment is.

Doomsayers conveniently forget that the business case for introducing debit cards was one of cost avoidance for the banks, not revenue.

The Affordable Care Act was meant to spark a major increase in electronic payments, yet progress has been slowed by confusion and lack of interest.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, by hosting the Bitcoin Foundation in Washington D.C. this week, demonstrated its commitment to learning more about the disruptive virtual currency.

Lawyers for clothing retailer Genesco Inc. last week requested summary judgment on its request to dismiss $10,000 in data breach fines from Visa Inc.

The U.S. Federal Reserve asked that its rules on debit-card transaction fees and processing be left in place while it appeals a decision that they are illegal.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will continue discussions with the Bitcoin community after meeting with the Bitcoin Foundation and a host of regulators and law enforcement officers in Washington D.C. today.

A federal judge raised the possibility that banks will have to repay billions of dollars to merchants, but legal experts say the court lacks the authority to enact such an order.

A court ruling that debit card fee caps be lowered could also enable merchants to play card networks against one another.

The U.S. Federal Reserve was given a week to tell a federal judge its position on immediately rewriting regulations setting debit card swipe fees after a court found the current rule unlawful.

Fallon Community Health Plan will implement PaySpan's automated payments platform for enrollment, reimbursement and other transactions in line with new rules tied to the Affordable Care Act.

VeriFone has begun outfitting on-board payments systems on New York City's new street-hail livery cars.

EMV chips improve security over magnetic-stripe cards, but they have not been easy to implement. Years ago, a Forrester analyst said "the U.S. is going to adopt EMV in about the same way the U.S. adopted the metric system — somewhere between kicking and screaming and not at all." What have been the biggest hurdles?

Launched in April 2010, Think Computer Corp.'s FaceCash application signed up 25 Bay Area merchants and 500 consumers to use its novel technology, which combined mobile bar code scanning and photo identification. Then regulators put it out of business.

The payments industry was thrown for a loop when a judge struck down the Federal Reserve Board's cap on debit interchange fees. It was the latest twist in a long-running saga that is far from over.

Though some issues remained, it seemed the card brands and debit networks were closer than ever to resolving their longstanding debate over EMV debit card routing when a federal judge potentially changed everything.