PaymentsJournal

Today’s technical decision-makers face pressure to increase the company’s revenue while keeping risk low in the consumer checkout process. If a customer’s legitimate payment transaction gets declined because a merchant’s tech isn’t advanced enough, this has the potential to result in a lost customer.  One of the most important parts of streamlining your payment process and increasing you...

Blackhawk Network, a California-based company in the prepaid, gift card, and payments industry, joined forces with NAPCO Research, the “research arm” of NAPCO Media, a B2B digital media company, for the fifth year. Their aim? To assess the in-store, online, and mobile gift card program experiences across more than 225 merchants. This time, their annual research has extended beyond the U.S. and inc...

Many financial institutions are in a time of transition. With the continuous decline in check volume,  it’s important for banks and credit unions to find efficiencies where they can. One area where financial institutions can realize immediate benefits is by outsourcing their item processing function. To learn more, PaymentsJournal sat with Joe Pachunka , CIO of Deposit Solutions at Fiserv, an...

Fraud and cyberattacks that target children are alarmingly on the rise. According to data from an upcoming report to be published by Javelin Strategy & Research, nearly $1 billion was lost to child ID fraud in 2021. Furthermore, 1 in 50 children were affected by child identity fraud during the past year and 1 in 45 minors’ personal information was exposed via data breaches in the past year. Th...

Times of rampant high inflation, such as that we are living in now, affect consumers and businesses in various ways. But one segment that is typically most adversely affected by inflation are workers who are paid an hourly wage. How can earned wage access make an impact? As inflation forces difficult spending and budgeting decisions in households across the country, this demographic is among the h...

There is a common misconception that business credit cards are only for midsize to large businesses, as small business owners commonly use personal credit cards for their businesses. Furthermore, marketing for business cards has not traditionally been targeted at small business owners. However, banks are starting to rethink that strategy. They see small businesses as essential for business card po...

For debit and credit card issuers, marketing has always been a pillar to growing the business: attracting new customers, activating those who have gone dormant, and finding incentives that increase business from active customers. As happened with so many elements of consumers’ lives, the fundamentals of their engagement with card accounts shifted after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring...

The ACH (Automated Clearing House) Network affects most Americans daily, having moved nearly $73 trillion in payments in 2021, according to Nacha, the organization that governs it.  As payments constantly evolve and become more digital and faster , the ACH Network is also evolving in order to meet the needs of both businesses and consumers. To learn more about how it is handling the new world...

Halfway through 2022, it’s not that the fight against payments fraud has shifted to a whole new ball game. While criminals’ tactics are ever-evolving, the real challenge lies in the breadth and complexity of the fraud. It’s many ball games on many fields, all at once, and that’s the environment confronted by card issuers, merchants, and consumers alike. Eric Kraus , Vice President of Fraud, Risk a...

Digital transformation is top of mind for financial institutions of all stripes, yet many are cautious when initiating such projects and unsure where to begin due to the inherent risk associated with modernizing legacy systems . This is especially true when it comes to modernizing payments systems. Today’s consumer wants to not only pay using traditional card-based methods, but also wants to use t...

There is a common misconception that today’s bank and credit union customers want to do everything in a digital channel. The fact is that when it comes to financial services, consumers often have high expectations: in-person assistance when help is needed, plus the convenience of on-demand, self-service digital and mobile channels. How can retail banks and ATMs help meet these expectations? ATMs p...

Digital innovation has transformed payments for businesses and consumers in recent years. One area that has lagged, however, is accounts receivable (AR). Many businesses still rely on manual, time-consuming, and costly processes when it comes to AR. But that’s beginning to change. Advanced technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are starting to transform...

The technology and payment rails to enable real-time payments in the U.S. already exist, though real-time and faster payments still have not entirely permeated the U.S. financial system. That’s because many of the more than 10,000 banks and credit unions in the U.S. today have been slow to adopt real-time payments. The reasons for this are myriad , including the complexity of integrating new payme...

Buy Now, Pay Later (also known as BNPL) as a consumer financing option—and, importantly, a merchant marketing tool—is a relatively recent arrival to the scene, if also a fresh branding of a not-so-new idea. PayPal’s June 15 announcement of its Pay Monthly product, allowing customers to make a purchase and break the payments over a period of six to 24 months, proved a good entry point for a Payment...

Merchants, their acquiring banks, and payment service providers (PSPs) all face a daunting challenge: They’re under pressure to reduce ever-increasing transaction fraud while at the same time increasing revenue by taking on more volume with less friction for customers and merchants where sales are made.  According to Amyn Dhala , Chief Product Officer at Brighterion , a Mastercard company, th...

It’s 2022 and many consumers are splitting restaurant bills with peer-to-peer (P2P) apps and initiating a wide range of payments without having ever written a check, or in some cases, even having a checkbook.  On the flip side, according to Payveris Chief Innovation Officer Marcell King , some consumers are making big-ticket monthly payments for items such as cars and mortgages by dispatching...

Like companies in other realms of financial services, credit unions must grapple with how to build the experiences their members want in a world that is increasingly digital, particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As more and more of their members adopt digital tools to access their accounts and engage with their financial institutions, credit unions are devoting more resources to...

Payment facilitation, or PayFac, is quickly becoming table stakes for many merchants. With new technology diversifying payment methods across all industries, merchants are clamoring for streamlined payment acceptance functionality. Businesses are increasingly looking toward independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide those services, and those ISVs want to deliver fast and easy payment acceptanc...

One needn’t look far to see that neobanks and other types of digital-only banks — the upstarts in financial services — have altered retail banking.  These numbers tell part of the story:  Chime: 13.1 million U.S. accountholders  Current: 4.0 million  Aspiration: 3.0 million  Varo: 2.7 million  But there’s more: The five-year projection from 2021 to 2025, shows that the number of U.S. acc...

For any leader of an organization steeped in payments — banks, fintechs, and technology providers — it’s a time of great opportunity and great complexity.   Customer demand for instant payments, instant credit decisioning, and more-frictionless payments is increasing. Borders are coming down, at least in the realm of transactions, creating a need for solutions that enable the free moveme...

The many digital touchpoints today’s consumers use to connect with merchants and buy products have been a boon for businesses. Merchants have many different digital avenues to meet customers where they are and enable quick and seamless payments options for products and services. While this digital world has created convenience, it has also created ample opportunities for fraud. It’s much easi...

In the current environment of high inflation, soaring gas prices, and threat of recession, consumers are looking to get the most out of their purchases and being judicious about where they spend their money. That is why rewards programs are more critical today than ever; merchants and businesses need the right rewards program in place to entice existing customers to continue to spend and to attrac...

Real-time payments occupy a unique niche in the payments industry, both for its diversity and its rapid growth . The Clearing House RTP® network processes more than $16 billion each quarter, and Zelle processes more than $120 billion. Direct push payments such as Mastercard Send and Visa Direct settle payments in less than thirty minutes and usually within seconds, and same-day Automated Clearing...

The payments systems infrastructure at many traditional financial institutions — banks and credit unions — is showing its age at a time when new, nimble players are entering the space. These lumbering systems, many of which were constructed 50 years ago for electronic funds transfers and card services, are being left behind entirely by fintechs, or they are being shored up with patchwork infrastru...

Last January, Equifax announced a definitive agreement to acquire Kount, a digital identity trust and fraud prevention solution provider. On February 11, 2021, another Equifax announcement declared that the acquisition was complete.   One year after the acquisition, Equifax has made noteworthy progress in combining the strengths of the two organizations to help businesses better engage w...