I’m at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank’s conference on Consumer Payment Innovation. Bruce Summers, Former Director, Federal Reserve Information Technology, just finished presenting a major paper on payments system infrastructure and the Fed’s potential role in new systems in the future. The paper, which builds on an earlier paper coming out of the Chicago Fed’s Symposium on [...]
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Consumers transfer tens of billions of dollars from the United States each year in international remittances. In 2009 the World Bank estimated that US$48 billion was sent from American consumers to friends and family in other countries, a number that represents 0.3% of our GDP.While consumer international remittances are a big business, transparency and consumer protection [...]
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I’ve spent part of my weekend contemplating the public relations hubbub that broke out late last week around Bank of America’s announcement that it would assess a $5 monthly fee on certain of its checking account holders who choose to use their debit cards for point-of-sale purchases. It’s a polarizing issue. At one level, I [...]
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Glenbrook’s Carol Coye Benson and Erin McCune are interviewing leading commercial payment providers and enablers to understand whether we’ve finally reached the ‘tipping point’ for B2B payments. This post featuring Western Union is the second of a series of interviews that we will be featuring here at Payments Views. You can learn more about the [...]
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Point of sale (POS) steering isn’t really part of the payments industry dialogue right now as various stakeholders praise, argue, and criticize the proposed Federal Reserve rules on debit card interchange and network routing. But, I think it could be a big part of how things could unfold in the near future. Let’s start with [...]
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After months of speculation and hand-wringing, last Friday we finally got a relatively complete reading on how the Federal Reserve will likely implement the prescribed regulation of debit interchange and debit network competition. My partner, Carol Benson, has also shared a summary of how various payment domains and players might be affected in the near [...]
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At Glenbrook, we think (and teach!) about the payments industry by domains (the purpose of the payment) and players (users and providers). Our quick take on the impact of yesterday’s proposed rules on each is below. One general assumption I’ve made here is that the gap between debit interchange from big banks, and from smaller [...]
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Last June, in an article titled “The End of Interchange“, I wrote about the then yet to be passed Durbin amendment – and how it might affect debit interchange fees. Earlier today, we got the first glimpse. The point of my earlier article was focused on the “sleeper” – as I described it – in [...]
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There, did I get your attention? … Tonight’s headlines say it even more clearly – see this Wall St. Journal story titled “Merchants Win Debit-Card Fee Battle“. Or, see this post on PaymentsNews.com about the Durbin compromise announced earlier today. Seriously, it seems to me that there’s a bit of a sleeper buried in all [...]
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I’ve been amazed by what I’ve been reading of late from the “analyst” firms commenting on the Durbin Amendment. A lot of what I’ve seen makes me wonder whether these folks should turn in their analyst licenses and simply register as paid lobbyists for their big bank clientele. (The Durbin amendment, for those not in [...]
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The dramatic vote on the Durbin amendment is causing panic, again, among retail bankers – who were last shocked by the Fed’s overdraft ruling. I wrote about that in November (Watch Out! Big Changes in Retail Bank Pricing Are Coming). I think the underlying problem that banks are dealing with is that too much of [...]
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I spent most of 2008 and early 2009 completely obsessed with the credit crisis (evidenced by this index of the best crisis coverage I created just over a year ago). Reading this Andrew Ross Sorkin piece in tomorrow’s New York Times got me all riled up again: What the Financial Crisis Commission Should Ask NYTimes’ [...]
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The Fed’s announcement on Thursday of a new rule prohibiting overdraft fees on debit card and ATM transactions without consumer opt-in is an economic earthquake for retail banks. The Center for Responsible Lending has estimated that banks make $23.7 billion in overdraft fees annually; the New York Times said this morning that Fed officials had [...]
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Consistent with the current government focus on enhancing consumer protection, the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (Credit CARD Act of 2009) brings sea changes to the credit card industry. Forward-looking financial services institutions are viewing these shifts not as a reactive compliance and operational exercise, but more broadly in anticipation of [...]
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The always brilliant Michael Lewis and David Einhorn are guest op-ed contributors in today's NYTimes. Their (very long and convincing) argument is that misaligned interests throughout the financial eco-system contribute to a systemic problem: short-term gain vs. long-term interests, a complete lack of meaningful checks and balances (via credit rating agencies), and incompetence and political [...]
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