Past Articles
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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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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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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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Why Mobile Payments Don’t Deliver for Merchants
Aug 26, 2019Mobile payments so far account for a mere 2% or less of U.S. general-purpose card payments, according to some estimates, and that’s no surprise to some executives who believe mobile payments haven’t delivered for many merchants.
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MAG Supports Federal Reserve’s Involvement in Faster Payments
Aug 5, 2019Merchants encourage the Fed to collaborate with payments stakeholders when developing and operating their new real-time payments rail.
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Merger, Merger, Merger – What Does it Mean for the Merchant?
Jun 6, 2019Should merchants expect upsides or shortcomings as a result of the ongoing merger activity across the payments industry? Or will merchants feel little impact of the continued consolidation? It is tough to decide how this will all play out but one thing we can be sure of is that this industry movement will continue.
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Encryption: A Primer on Some of the Benefits, Limitations and Considerations
Jun 6, 2019According to Gemalto’s Breach Level Index website, since 2013 more than 14.7 billion records were lost or stolen and only 4% of breaches involved systems where encryption was utilized. Said another way, that equates to 73 records per SECOND in that span. Now, it’s safe to say that most merchants want to secure their customer’s sensitive payment data and all merchants want to avoid being the subject of the next breaking news story on customer data breaches.
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Payment implications of XS2A: potential benefits for both consumers and merchants
Jun 6, 2019Merchants are asking questions about PSD2. Rightfully so—the initiative is transforming payments across the European market. With these new regulations taking place, what are some of the payment implications and what do they mean for businesses and consumers?
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United We Stand or Divided We Pay: Checking/ACH payment Conversions to Virtual Cards
Jun 6, 2019There are many large companies profiting from the practice of intercepting checking account bill payments and converting them to Virtual Cards. The practice is pretty simple, companies pay kickbacks to bill payment processors to process their checking account payments. Instead of sending the payments as electronic checks to merchant electronic lockboxes like most large reputable banks, the companies have bots set up to pump Virtual Card payments in at merchant websites and IVRs. They do this for one reason – to profit off the near 3% interchange fees.
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Payment Standard - Relevance to Merchants
Mar 7, 2019Standards in the payments industry are designed and published by various bodies. Often the day to day engagement with those standards organizations requires a level of technical expertise. However, it is of critical importance to ensure business intelligence is layered on top to influence the technical design. Retailers, financial institutions, and service providers alike that deliver experiences to their customers must engage in the evolution of payment standard design. Your customers are worth it.
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Contactless 3.0
Mar 7, 2019We all remember the promises when contactless was first issued over a decade ago on cards in the United States - it was going to revolutionize the checkout process. We were told not only would contactless improve the checkout experience but somehow it was also going to increase the average purchase and frequency of our customers. Several issuers spent the additional money to include the contactless chip on cards but not many merchants saw the benefit of adding new technology to the checkouts.
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Protecting Your Most Valuable Currency - Data
Mar 7, 2019With fraud losses in the U.S. reaching a staggering $24.B in recent years, merchants undoubtedly understand the importance of prioritizing and maintaining laser-sharp focus on cybersecurity to avoid becoming another data breach statistic. News stories are plentiful with examples of businesses across almost every industry experiencing security breaches, which affirms the unfortunate reality that no business is too big or too small to become the target of a cyberattack.
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Mixed reviews for Visa's new chargeback process
Dec 6, 2018It might be too early to determine the full impact of the new Visa Claims Resolution process designed to streamline and limit chargebacks, but 52 percent of respondents surveyed claimed no decrease in chargebacks since VCR, and most of the 33 percent reporting a decline cited a decrease of less than 5 percent.
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