Past Articles
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Community Contributions Towards Positive Change
Dec 10, 2020As we come to the end of the calendar year, we should all look back and evaluate our contributions to our personal and professional development, including the investments we made in driving change personally and professionally with, of course, recognition to that which is within our control. What were your contributions in this challenging year of 2020, and where do you want to focus your efforts in 2021 in order to influence the future?
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MAG 2020 Year-in-Review
Dec 9, 2020The date was February 11th, MAG was having the opening session of the Mid-Year Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, with hundreds of payment professionals gathered to network and learn about payment services, trends and initiatives that impact merchants’ customers and bottom line.
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Merchant Business Group Launched by W3C
Dec 9, 2020Web standards organization the World Wide Web consortium launches forum for online merchant requirements with discounted membership available for MAG members.
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The 3 Types of Payment Fraud and How to Prevent Them
Dec 5, 2020To accurately prevent and respond to disputes, merchants must understand why a dispute happened. To do so, merchants can categorize payment fraud into three different types and learn how to prevent each kind of fraud.
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A Year of Opportunity
Dec 3, 2020This year started with hope and promise no different from years prior, but it took a sudden and unexpected change, COVID-19, that has challenged us all in different ways. For some, the challenge has been centered around how to keep the country fed and employees safe. For others, it has been focused on how to keep businesses viable. In a matter of days, we were creating new business practices to serve our customers in ways we had not considered in the past while also accelerating pilots of new operational models to serve their expectations.
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The Magnetic Stripe Retirement Plan
Jul 1, 2020The magnetic stripe has been around since the sixties – the same decade I was born as well as the birth of the cassette tape. Is it time for this major underperformer to retire? Not me! I am talking about the retirement of the magnetic (mag) stripe. Although I won’t comment on my relevance in today’s environment, we all know how things turned out for the audio cassette.
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Kroger’s Path to EMV at their Automated Fueling Dispenser
Jul 1, 2020Multiple teams and vendors at Kroger spent three years of planning, development, and rollout to ensure its Fuel Dispenser EMV conversion was a success not just for the company, but for customers as well.
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Secure Remote Commerce and the SRCI
Mar 5, 2020You may have noticed that every website you visit supports a variety of different checkout experiences. Some use PayPal, Visa Checkout, or Masterpass, but others use their own custom experiences. Often, this means you must re-enter the same details on many different websites.
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How Open Banking is Disrupting Retail Banking – Except for Payments Markets
Mar 5, 2020Open Banking is the technology that enables non-bank financial firms - e.g. “fintechs” - to access consumer-authorized financial data, such as personal and business checking-account transaction data. Open banking is proclaimed as driving the fintech revolution, transforming retail banking, and disrupting the global payments market.
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Navigating Payment Projects Through Your Organization
Mar 5, 2020Many of you likely have significant projects which you are responsible to complete, especially as we start the new year. I thought it might be helpful to share effective ways to approach, prioritize and accomplish strategic projects.
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Webinars: The Most Binge-Worthy Series of 2020
Mar 5, 2020One of the things we hear most from our merchant members is that they’re hungry for more. Hungry for more collaboration, more discussion, more education, and overall more payments.
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Building a Technology Strategy to Support your Business
Mar 5, 2020There are three components that I like to think about when building a solid payment technology strategy: business drivers, technology choices, and team. The strategy should focus on the ideas that enable business priorities and customer needs. It needs to consider technology costs, tech-stack choices, vendor integrations, and security & privacy. Lastly, team is a critical part of the strategy.
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Ways to help you thrive in an omnichannel payments environment
Mar 5, 2020Omnichannel is now a must for B2C and B2B companies alike. It's all about ensuring a seamless, consistent experience for your customers, regardless of how they engage with your business, or which payment method they use to buy.
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SCA: Two-Dimensional Thinking with 3-D Secure
Dec 5, 2019Strong Customer Authentication Needs Alternative Solutions to be Developed: Otherwise Merchants will Foot the Bill, Again
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What Role Should Merchants Play in Standards?
Dec 5, 2019Since I first entered the payment space almost two decades ago there has been constant cycles of evolution around payments. The problem is those cycles continue to speed up every couple of years. One of my first projects in payments was converting paper checks to electronic ACH payments for Dayton Hudson's private label cards. Now days we're discussing things like Secure Remote Commerce, Online Fraud, EMV 3D Secure, Authentication, Biometrics, and alternative payment systems like WeChat Pay and Alipay.
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The MAG as a Critical Resource in the Payments Space
Dec 5, 2019Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores is family owned and operated and began in 1964 with a single gas station in Watonga, Oklahoma. Over the last 55 years, Love’s has grown into one of the nation’s leading retailers of motor fuels and related products and services, operating 500 locations in 41 states. Love’s joined the MAG in August of 2012. Stewart Terbush, Director of Operations Accounting at Love’s considers the MAG to be a critical resource to drive success in the payments space. We asked Stewart to share his insights on Love’s relationship with the MAG, and how that relationship creates value for all concerned. Click here to read what Stewart and the team at Love’s has to say about their experiences with the MAG.
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Don't Delay...No Delay
Dec 3, 2019As another year comes to an end, retailers are heads down on the holiday shopping season, competing fiercely to attract and retain customers and drive towards their annual profit goals, while making sure their people and systems can handle the high transaction volumes during this peak period. Complicating matters is the increasing risk of losses due to ever increasing payment fraud.
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Enhanced Security or Alternative Routing – Why Should Merchants Have to Choose?
Sep 5, 2019 byLaura TownsendThe U.S. market offers a wide variety of competitive alternative networks to which merchants can route debit transactions that can deliver a reduced cost of payment acceptance. Yet there are barriers in the market. What is the opportunity and the considerations?
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EMV Liability Shift 2.0
Sep 5, 2019If you thought the shifting of fraud liability from the issuers to the merchants was complete, it must mean you don’t operate a fuel station. When the original date was set for the implementation of EMV in 2015, EMVCo made an exception for automated fuel pump transactions. The delayed liability shift date for outside pumps at fuel stations is October 2020 due to the complexities of updating the pumps. As the date approaches, the industry grapples with many issues on implementation, and one must consider if the date is still too aggressive.
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Installment Payments – Who Stands to Benefit?
Sep 5, 2019As point-of-sale installment payments become more prevalent in the United States, it is worth examining the various models for installment payments and understanding how installments in international markets have evolved. When evaluating installment payment programs, it is important to understand the costs and benefits for all stakeholders, including consumers, merchants, and banks.
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