Surcharging is a tricky issue with a lot of different stakeholder perspectives to consider. In this episode, Emily Tsitrian, co-founder of Yeeld, joins Bryan Derman and Drew Edmond to share industry insights on this emerging practice and how businesses can best implement surcharging while staying compliant.
Prepaid cards are the "apps" of the card world. Join George and Fiserv's Head of Prepaid Dom Morea as they introduce prepaid's twin modalities - open loop and closed loop - and then dive into how the gift card industry has morphed into a far broader set of uses cases. And plan to return for the next episode as they discuss open loop's evolution.
Payment authorization rates are a theme we return to regularly on Payments on Fire® because they matter so much to merchants, issuers, and the payment providers in between. If an issuer declines more transactions than its peers, the merchant and the issuer, in fact, leave money on the table. The merchant loses sales. The issuer loses interchange revenue.
The Faster Payments Task Force has brought together a broad constituency with the payments industry thoroughly represented. And thanks to participation by organizations like Consumers Union, the people who bring us Consumer Reports, the voice of the consumer has been well represented in determining important evaluation criteria.
The Internet of Things (IoT) will bring us a tsunami of network-enabled devices, for consumer use as well as yet to be imagined industrial and commercial applications. Many of these devices will be payment enabled, many using card payment rails. Securing those billions of IoT devices is going to require techniques deployed by the mobile industry, the card industry, and other sectors. Cryptographic hardware will be part of the solution.
Chargebacks are one of the card system's great consumer benefits. If fraud happens, the merchant doesn't deliver on what was promised, or you're charged six times for something you bought just once, the chargeback mechanism returns your money or restores your credit. What's not to like? Well, if you're a merchant, a lot. While there are plenty of legitimate chargebacks, there are also consumers who take advantage of the system through "friendly fraud," the "I didn't do it" chargeback category abused by all too many.
Payments industry professionals naturally have a hard focus on the industry's own dynamics. So, it's not uncommon to lose sight of who the customer is and who pays the freight. In retailing, yes, the consumer pays, but payments is a direct cost to the merchant. With all of the changes underway in the U.S. payments landscape, merchants now address payments as a complex, strategic element of their business, both as a way to drive new sales as well as a cost component to be tightly managed.
Interchange galvanizes the attention of regulators around the world like iron filings to a magnet. Everyone in card payments watches their moves closely because of its economic impact on merchants, card networks, issuers, acquirers and, in theory, consumer pricing. European regulators are among the most recent to weigh in.
EMV and its moving parts presents a far more complex payments method for merchants, ISVs, payment processors, and financial institutions than the good old magstripe. It continues to have ramifications throughout the payments ecosystem.
