Merchant

Wells Fargo and the denial stage of recovery; community bankers alarmed after big banks backtrack on faster-payments pricing; credit card, auto loan delinquencies hit seven-year high; and more from this week's most-read stories.

Arguments that the central bank should develop its own system for faster payments ignore current market realities, says The Clearing House, which has developed its own network.

A hacker can infect multiple point-of-sale terminals with malware by entering through a "smart" coffee vending machine at a grocery store or restaurant. And the store owners are largely unaware of the risk.

Mastercard and MercadoPago, the payments arm of Latin American e-marketplace MercadoLibre, see opportunities for contactless prepaid cards among unbanked consumers even though local issuers have been slow to adopt the format.

Social media commerce platform provider Jumper.ai is helping Amazon merchants complete online transactions without the buyer being redirected to the Amazon online marketplace.

The chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee promised to block action on the agency's budget unless it can justify its fee-hike request.

Gail Jansen, who oversees member business lending at Kinecta Federal Credit Union, warned that increasing fees for Small Business Administration loans would hurt borrowers.

The bipartisan bill, praised by credit union trade groups, is the top 2019 legislative priority for the Defense Credit Union Council.

In 2016, a big-bank consortium said that it would charge the same prices to all institutions, regardless of their size. But now the group has added a large caveat to that pledge.

The online lender's recent completion of a $700 million securitization provided Jonathan Ebinger at BlueRun Ventures an opportunity to reflect on what he has learned about the power of alternative data.