Network rules

The coronavirus pandemic has added a troubling twist to the already difficult process of converting fuel pumps to accept EMV chip cards and communicate with the stations' point-of-sale terminals.

Credit card chargebacks were rising in certain categories prior to the coronavirus outbreak, but the pandemic is causing a spike in all types of payment card disputes.

Mastercard has increased the contactless payment limit to CA$250 across Canada to provide consumers with a safer way to pay during the coronavirus pandemic.

Interchange fees are a major part of the costs merchants pay to accept payment cards. While merchants seek relief from fees during a time in which their businesses face serious damage from stay-at-home edicts because of coronavirus, the credit card companies and banks quickly began to dig in their heels.

While much of the world is sheltering at home to deter the spread of coronavirus, there's still a need for essential workers to travel — and an opportunity for the development of in-car payments technology, which could allow consumers to pay for gas or food without handling cash or other potentially infected surfaces.

With coronavirus driving more merchants to promote electronic payments over cash — and contactless payments over cards — many are still asking their customers to share a potentially virus-laden pen to sign a receipt or screen at the point of sale.

With coronavirus presenting significant challenges for retailers and the technical challenges of imposing interchange fee changes in the networks, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover are holding off on the updates.

It's still unclear how the coronavirus pandemic will alter payment habits over time — will consumers avoid cash out of fear of germs, or will they favor it as the one payment option that nearly all merchants accept? An impending change in interchange rates may tip the scales in cash's favor.

The decisions made five years ago are creating problems for contactless payments today.

Barclays, which processes nearly half the U.K.’s credit and debit card transactions, has signed a multi-year partnership that extends its 50-year relationship with Visa.

Visa typically adjusts its interchange rates every April and October, but this year it is getting an atypically strong response.

Since the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard was introduced in 2004, many merchants found compliance to be too arduous or costly and just skipped it, risking fines. But increasingly, other regulations like GDPR are changing the PCI DSS compliance equation.

In a move to increase the attractiveness of its Real-Time Payment network, The Clearing House is raising the transactional limit for single payments to $100,000 starting Feb. 1.

In a move to increase the attractiveness of its Real-Time Payment (RTP) network, The Clearing House is raising the transactional limit for single payments to $100,000 starting February 1, 2020.

Marqeta has been certified as a European card processor with Mastercard to help digital banks issue cards more quickly, signing Twisto as the first customer of the collaboration.

Seeking to clarify how merchants and banks should handle PIN debit transactions, the Accredited Standards Committee X9 and PCI Security Standards Council have created a unified standard.

The specific impetus for the Federal Trade Commission's inquiry into Visa and Mastercard's debit transaction routing processes is not entirely clear, but it likely stems from the effect that advanced payments technology has had on Durbin amendment compliance.

Samsung's upcoming XCover Pro phone, which can accept contactless payments without add-on hardware, is the first of what Visa hopes will be many devices capable of natively handling NFC payments.

After getting a reprieve from a 2017 deadline, gas stations now have less than a year to upgrade to EMV security at the pump — and the card brands aren't showing signs that they will be willing to postpone this mandate another time.

Oklahoma lawmakers' decision last month to drop the state's surcharging ban was yet another signal that U.S. merchants have the final say in whether to apply extra charges to credit card transactions to offset interchange fees.