Network rules

Under its new chargeback rules, Visa retired one of the chargeback codes that merchants almost always lost — "transaction not recognized," formerly listed as Chargeback Reason Code 75.

Mastercard and Worldpay are embarking on a strong push to promote Mastercard's Pay by Bank system, which will likely face a deluge of competition under the updated Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which took effect this year.

Though Costco is no longer called out in the New York issuer's earnings calls, the loss of that business added fuel to a change within the company that is showing results.

As technology advances for business-to-business or cross-border transactions, the accompanying messaging standard must evolve at the same rapid pace.

Mastercard has become the latest major card network to suffer a high profile crash. With its Thursday incident coming hard on the heels of Visa’s crash last month many experts wonder if blockchain technology could prevent future card network outages.

About a month after Visa's European outage, Mastercard encountered a similar glitch for a brief period of time on Thursday.

The Bank of England, together with the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority, has cautioned U.K. banks to prepare for cyberattacks and technical failures.

This week's ruling from a U.K. appeals court is the latest of many episodes in a battle between merchants and card brands that has influenced regulations, technology, market strategies and nearly all other aspects of the payments ecosystem.

A British appeals court ruled in favor of retailers including J Sainsbury Plc in a blow to credit card firms that could now face billions of pounds in damages.

China UnionPay has qualified FIME’s personalization validation tool (PVT), marking the Chinese payment brand’s first certification of an overseas lab for testing its secure chip products.

Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. are getting close to settling a 13-year-old lawsuit over fees charged when merchants accept card payments, according to a person familiar with the agreement.

The U.S. Supreme Court threw out a government lawsuit that accused American Express Co. of thwarting competition by prohibiting merchants from steering customers to cards with lower fees.

While Europe is still making sense of an international Visa outage in early June, fintech disruptor TransferWise experienced its own outage that lasted up to 11 hours on Thursday, with website, app and card payments unavailable to the company’s 1 million-plus users.

Visa, which was criticized for its vague explanation of a June 1 outage in Europe, was in the process of installing better technology, but the project was not complete at the time of the incident and won't be finished until the end of this year.

As contactless cards continue their momentum in the U.K., new use cases are popping up for the tap-and-go technology.

Visa has moved to cut its debit transaction fees in India by 95%, bringing it more in line with RuPay, India’s state-run domestic debit scheme.

As the gig economy balloons, a private network is adding partners and geographies to separate itself in a fintech-dominated market.

Two factions that have taken on the card networks on separate fronts are combining their might in the latest effort to pressure Visa and Mastercard. Even so, there is not a lot of reason for the credit card brands to change their methods.

While the 'buy button' is designed to benefit merchants, issuers and the card networks alike, merchants may not be willing to risk any tradeoff in their access to customer data.

Retailer associations and debit network providers have formed the Secure Payments Partnership, designed to address the ongoing problem of payment fraud.