Network rules

Visa's management faces an unwelcome choice: It can share more information about internal shortcomings or mistakes that caused payments to shut off temporarily, or get summoned to Parliament for a politically-infused public questioning.

One thing is clear: This outage, however brief, undermines the card networks' ability to market themselves as the fundamental platforms for a new era of payments technology.

Merchants, banks, fintechs and card networks may crave digital payments' treasure trove of data over cash's simple anonymity, but any weakness in a centralized ecosystem threatens the entire network, as Visa learned late last week.

Visa Canada plans to offer real-time B2B and B2C disbursements via its Visa Direct card-to-card transfer service, competing head-on with Canada's Interac network and a product Mastercard launched in the country earlier this year.

Details are still scarce about how the payment networks’ universal checkout "button" will look, but each participant will have some branding representation.

Visa and Mastercard's "single button" for online payments seems like it would most directly threaten PayPal, but the card networks' campaign puts just as much pressure on Amazon's omnichannel push.

Mastercard's CEO sang the praises of a single "button" for online purchases, a stance that puts heat on online payment leader PayPal without the whiff of a direct attack.

American Express has issued a series of deadlines for merchant acquirers in markets outside of the U.S. in an attempt to jolt the global migration.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication has its sights set on expanding real-time payments in the Asia-Pacific region as part of its plan to further its first value-add service created from the Global Payments Innovation initiative.

A fight between U.K. retailers and credit-card companies that has lasted five years and spawned wildly different court rulings reached a London appeals court Monday that could determine the fates of lawsuits potentially worth billions.

By any measure, if Visa can trim more than two weeks off a chargeback dispute, it should help merchants and cardholders. But like many efforts to improve the payments market, it won't be an easy change.

The card networks recently admitted what consumers have long suspected—card signatures have become worthless for authentication at the point of sale. But that's not the end of this story.

MoviePass has purchased Moviefone, the movie listing and information service, in a deal that gives momentum to a business that owes its success to honor-all-cards rules.

In yet another twist on the idea of a cryptocurrency debit card, MoxyOne has developed its own network as a way to address the setbacks some have faced in relying on Visa and Mastercard.

There are still millions of merchants in the U.S. clinging to relic point of sale methods — and they are not easily swayed by fancy new touchscreens and mobile wallets. This means companies such as Verifone must go to greater lengths, just to meet them halfway.

The breach at Expedia's Orbitz not only jeopardized nearly 880,000 payment cards — it cast a spotlight on the weaknesses all companies expose themselves to when they partner with another brand.

As gas stations add EMV-chip card acceptance at the pump, they will also find themselves rebuilding systems for loyalty programs and special offers that were reliant on their older hardware.

Citing a need for merchants to better understand payments behavior across various digital channels, Visa has launched Token Management Service for its global clients.

There are still regions where contactless and EMV cards are slow to roll out, and Mastercard is working to bring these markets up to speed so that they are ready for future innovations.

Plenty of U.S. banks already have their own robust API programs, but research by Nacha, the electronic payments association, indicates that the differences in their approaches could slow the banks' ability to synchronize with global fintech development.