Visa

Along with activating contactless payments at its store terminals, Costco has opened its checkout lines to Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay. But there’s a catch.

Kevin Jenkins, former managing director of Visa U.K. and Ireland, joined the board of London-based fintech Nuggets to oversee business development for the blockchain-based security provider as it enters the massive mobile payments market in Asia.

After 20 years of working with a clunky, time-consuming 3-D Secure authorization method for online purchases, the wheels are finally in motion to get the upgraded 2.0 version in place for merchants and banks, granting access to more data for spotting fraud.

Even as the payments landscape has become increasingly complicated and convoluted over the past several years, many industry players have not kept pace with their payments testing methods or tools, writes Steve Gilde, director of global product marketing for Paragon Application Systems.

Consumers, who often understand little to anything about the fees retailers pay to accept cards, will not care about the details of the fight and will place their displeasure solely on the shoulders of any large retailer that elects this strategy, writes Myron Schwarcz, executive vice president of Strategic Resource Management.

The U.S. companies agreed to reduce the average annual interchange rate in Canada by 10 basis points to 1.4 percent on cardThe new rate takes effect in 2020 and runs for five years. The government estimated that small and medium-sized businesses could save C$25,000 over the period.

Visa has continued to establish a more complete B2B offering, working through its Visa B2B Connect blockchain payments service to help companies establish application interfaces and platforms to handle business transactions more efficiently.

Contactless payments have simplified the checkout experience around the world, allowing customers to get on with their lives a bit quicker with a simple tap of a contactless-enabled card, phone or device, writes Dan Sanford, vice president of consumer products at Visa.

Visa has partnered with U.S.-based fintech novae to launch an omnichannel digital rewards platform for Visa card-issuing banks in Latin America and the Caribbean. The collaboration with San Francisco-based Novae is an example of the card network's open approach to fintech.

Kroger Co., the largest U.S. supermarket chain, said a California subsidiary will stop accepting Visa credit cards beginning next month in a dispute over swipe fees.