Tag: Visa | Page 6 | Infinicept

Exploding Internet Access Plus Ubiquitous Smartphone Use Equals Digital Payments Boom

All the digital payments innovation will pay off in some crazy numbers soon, says a report from non-profit think tank The Demand Institute, which is run by Nielsen and The Conference Board.

That strengthens the future of PFs worldwide, as cashless payments could result in over $10 trillion in additional consumer spending over the next 10 years, the report says. That figure is hand in hand with the report’s assertion that by 2020, the Internet will be available to over 1.2 billion more people than use it today. Much of that access will be through smartphones.

Facebook Dives Deeper Into Payments Under David Marcus, Competing As A PF, Again

The only thing separating Facebook from being a true payment facilitator is it registering as one. The social media giant today announced users of its Messenger app can now send payments from within the app to make purchases from sites who interface with the app using bots.

Facebook is working with Stripe, Braintree and PayPal, but also appears to be directly enabling acceptance of Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to make this happen, and Messenger users can store their card info in Messenger for use at checkout. This can be combined with the ability of brands being able to buy ads that take clickers into Messenger where their card info is saved. David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging and a former payments executive, has raised the Messenger user base from 700 million monthly active users to 1 billion in a year.

Mastercard And Visa Gain Strength, But Did PayPal?

The deal between Mastercard and PayPal announced Sep. 6 was different for a day than the Visa-PayPal partnership announced in July. Mastercard spokesperson Robyn Cottelli says being a payment choice in PayPal’s checkout is crucial, but not the only draw.

“Our thoughtful approach to the partnership with PayPal was not just focused on prominence as a payment option, but going beyond what we’ve seen Visa announce to drive further value for Mastercard and our partners,” Cotelli tells paymentfacilitator.com.

Tech Mobile Contactless Marketing Could Turn The U.S. EMV Frown Upside Down

More than a decade after the U.S. payments community tried and failed to make contactless payments work, EMV resentment and a well-funded mobile payment app movement may make U.S. contactless payments not merely viable, but vibrant—perhaps as soon as late 2018.

One result could be that the U.S. adopts mobile contactless payments before and in higher numbers than chip cards as tech giants like Apple and Samsung and Google blitz consumers with mobile payment app marketing that was not a factor when the country tried contactless a decade ago.

Global Mobile Brew Is Strong

Turkish coffee is almost as strong as Turkish use of mobile devices for banking and shopping and payments, but not as strong as the payments industry action in Europe. The Turks led a group of 15 countries in most of the categories of questions asked about mobile device usage for a recently released report on mobile banking, mobile shopping and mobile payments conducted for ING International by Ipsos.

The report is titled ING International Survey Mobile Banking 2016 but as ING economist Ian Bright explains, one thing has led to another, as it usually does in fintech, and banking only scratches the surface now, four years after its first mobile banking report.

Visa Puts Signature On Skirmish With Retailers

Visa filed a suit against Walmart June 30, the latest volley in a legal shootout with large retailers over EMV, chip-and-PIN and signature policies. “To me, it’s a clear escalation in the battle, said Rick Oglesby, president of AZ Payments Group and a partner at Double Diamond Group. “It’s never a good thing to be wrapped up in a public dispute with one of your largest and most influential customers, and the networks versus Walmart has been ongoing for many years.”

The suit claims Walmart surreptitiously tested a process in which shoppers were not given the choice to verify their Visa debit card purchases with a signature. It’s the most recent salvo in a battle among Visa and large retailers over the use of either signatures or PINs to verify transactions.

Kroger Details Its Fun-Filled Visa Negotiations

Have retailers suddenly started developing backbones, in terms of pushing back on payments companies? On Monday (June 27), Kroger sued Visa about how it was implementing EMV, in much the same way that Walmart and Home Depot have done. This follows Walmart kicking Visa out of Canada and a major German company rejecting PayPal after PayPal apologized and reinstated it. Did somebody spike the NRF water fountains with super-caffeine or something? Or have merchants decided that they can push back on payments giants with little risk of meaningful pain?

EMV rules seems to have been the PIN straw that broke the POS camel’s back, as even Apple Pay has suffered performance degradations following EMV migrations. The big picture arguments about security—that it’s blindingly obvious that PIN is far more secure than signature—are obscured by the reality that this is really a fight about interchange fees. And the EMV argument that the path to PIN must be glacially slow or else American consumers will freak out from the change, despite the fact that most are quite used to PINs from ATMs and debit cards, is frighteningly valid. And here it is in the land of EMV rules that grocery giant Kroger makes it stand.

Walmart’s Visa PIN Lawsuit Puts A “We Want Security” Face On A “We Want More Money” Argument

With their frequent lawsuits and counter-suits, Walmart and Visa is that always-quarreling couple that stays together for the sake of the kids. Only in this case, the kids are the piles of money each makes from the other. Alas, anything that forces the argument of PIN versus signature into the light is a good thing for payments and, by extension, payment facilitators.

Quick update on the latest example. On Tuesday (May 10), Walmart sued Visa, with the largest merchant saying that the largest card brand is forcing Walmart to accept signature on debit transactions when it would rather accept PIN. Walmart’s argument is that PIN is more secure—which it is—and Walmart neglects to stress that Walmart can save money by processing PIN transactions elsewhere.

Visa’s Quick Chip EMV Move, Banking On Perception To Trump Reality

Using the Electronic Transaction Association’s TRANSACT 16 event as a backdrop, Visa on Tuesday (April 19) rolled out Quick Chip for EMV, which the leading card brand described in a news release as being “a technology enhancement that optimizes EMC chip processing and speeds up checkout times.” Unfortunately, Quick Chip isn’t a technology enhancement nor does it optimize chip processing and it certainly doesn’t speed up checkout times. Other than that, the lead of Visa’s news release got it right.

What Quick Chip, however, does do is potentially just as powerful an aid to EMV—or quite destructive to EMV adoption, depending on who is talking—as what Visa claims. All that it does is allow the shopper to remove the card from the card reader much more quickly than current deployments permit. Given that the reader’s retention of the card until the full transaction is complete is behind a very high percentage of both merchant and consumer EMV complaints, this could be seen as a very good thing. Let’s break this down. For almost all transactions, the Quick Chip change won’t accelerate the total transaction time at all. The customer still needs to stand there until all products have scanned and the cashier has been given the final transaction approval. Therefore, from the merchant perspective of “how many shoppers can I push through the line in an hour?” this change is unlikely to help at all. But like so much of what happens in retail, reality never stands a chance against perception.

Visa’s New SMB Rules Add PF Complexities

When Visa recently added more rules on its smallest merchants—PCI Level 4s—it created a sales opportunity for payment facilitators by giving SMBs an even stronger reason to outsource its payments activities. At the same time, it added more complexity to PCI management for those PFs.

Mike Cottrell, head of global sales and marketing at ProPay, tried to put the new rules into perspective for payment facilitators in this week’s PaymentFacilitator.com podcast.