Network rules

Mastercard and Visa’s single online payment experience, which has angered some merchants and could shake up the e-commerce market from PayPal to Amazon, is progressing toward a 2019 launch.

What keeps execs up at night in the payments, retail and banking industries? Quite a lot, including disruption from tech giants and competition from foreign rivals.

In the U.S., most banks and retailers seemed to have given up on contactless cards with the 2011 demise of the much-publicized Chase Blink brand. But the payment format is making a strong comeback in 2018.

American Express Co.’s quest to be accepted everywhere from the corner bodega to the nail salon down the street is paying off.

Mastercard is making the first move among the card networks, again, on moving away from the signature requirement — completely removing the space for a signature from its cards.

This week marks the official start of Canada’s legalized recreational cannabis industry — and American Express, Visa and Mastercard are ready to handle the new market's payments, in a stark contrast to their stance in the U.S.

The U.K. market has reached a tipping point where consumers are conducting more in-store transactions using a contactless form of payment (card or phone) instead of a process that requires the card to be inserted into a POS terminal.

Shell has launched a new mobile app called Pay & Save, designed as a frictionless complement to the EMV-chip cards it must accept at its pumps by late 2020.

China’s Golden Week started on Monday and with it, global cities and merchants are boldly promoting Alipay in an effort to capture Chinese tourist dollars. At the same time, merchants are building out a competitive acceptance network that could someday rival the major payment card networks.

Visa is pursuing the online criminals to prevent future fraud. Visa also works with law enforcement agencies to quantify potential losses and, where possible, assist in the threat mitigation.

Contactless payments are a big success story in most countries around the world—including developing markets—but not in the U.S.

Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. agreed to pay as much as $6.2 billion to end a long-running price-fixing case brought by merchants over card fees, the largest-ever class action settlement of an antitrust case.

The growth and dominant market share position of payment cards in U.K. retail sales is prompting a new pushback from retailers who are wary of rising network fees.

In its role as a security compliance and disaster recovery firm, Sungard Availability Services has seen merchants warming up to the Payment Card Industry data security standards.

U.S. EMV coverage has gaping holes—including smaller financial institutions that haven’t fully converted to EMV and millions of merchant locations still not accepting chip cards.

With the advent of 3-D Secure 2.0, Underwriters Laboratories sees the e-commerce security standard as a launching pad for the company's advancement in the digital payments world.

While the card networks have greatly benefited by the global boom in e-commerce, they are confronted with the corresponding growth in digital advertising. This will increasingly lead them to seek out data-sharing deals like Mastercard's reported arrangement with Google, which could prove vital to the networks' future survival.

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.

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.

Mark Horwedel, the outgoing Merchant Advisory Group CEO, wasn't always on the merchants' side. Through much of the 1970s through 1990s, his career path placed him firmly in the world of bankers.