Complaints alleging widespread institutional failures in controlling fraudulent payment processing activity; rogue merchants charging consumer accounts thousands of dollars based on dubious or nonexistent authorizations; and...more
There has been an unprecedented wave of consolidation in the U.S. payment processing industry this year, with two major core processors acquiring the two largest merchant acquirers, and two of the largest remaining payment...more
Over the past couple of years, consumers have seen a proliferation of installment payment plans to finance the purchase of goods and services. At a high level, these plans are designed to help consumers pay off large...more
A divided U.S. Supreme Court sided with American Express Company and American Express Travel Related Services Company (Amex) over Ohio, sixteen other states and the United States based on the Court’s application of the theory...more
7/11/2018
/ American Express ,
Anti-Steering Rules ,
Anticompetitive Agreements ,
Antitrust Provisions ,
Burden of Proof ,
Credit Card Surcharges ,
Merchant Fees ,
Merchants ,
Ohio v American Express ,
Rule-of-Reason Analysis ,
SCOTUS
Should banks, while guarding against rolling episodes of misconduct by bankers, have the ability to blackball employees from the banking industry? A “bad apples” database of bank employees who have acted improperly in prior...more
PLA has for many years posted elite academic research questioning the utility of CARD Act disclosures. For example, in 2013 we posted Regulating Consumer Financial Products: Evidence from Credit Cards by Sumit Agarwal from...more
PLA today augments its popular UDAAP Enforcement Action Database page with a link to “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Law Enforcement: An Empirical Review,” by Professor Christopher L. Peterson. We hope you find it...more
Credit cards are central to the financial lives of most American consumers. Credit cards represent a key medium for U.S. consumer spending. In the first six months of 2015 alone, there were some 14.5 billion U.S. general...more
PLA today posts two excerpts from the First Data S-1 that give interesting overviews of the payments ecosystem from First Data’s perspective, as well as a list of certain First Data alliances and related arrangements....more
PLA today posts a link to “Unique in the Shopping Mall: On the Reidentifiability of Credit Card Metadata,” which concludes that card transaction data that was anonymized in conventional ways (e.g., by removing names and...more
A cobranded credit card program in which the “merchant” is in fact a charity may be subject to special rules relating to the regulation of “commercial co-ventures” (also known as “cause-related marketing”). Issuers and...more
The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) released general observations yesterday from a cybersecurity assessment of over 500 community financial institutions. The cybersecurity assessment evaluated the...more
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed a no-action letter policy under which the agency would issue letters stating that its staff “has no present intention to recommend initiation of an enforcement or...more
PLA often posts links to scholarly articles assessing or speculating about the effectiveness, from a consumer-protection standpoint, of disclosure and other regulatory regimes. Past such posts include, for example,...more
Most current cobrand and private-label agreements involve one or, more usually, two parties that are issuing, branding or developing non-traditional form factors alongside or in lieu of plastic cards. Some of these form...more
PLA today posts the GAO’s report, issued last month, analyzing the market for college debit cards and expressing concern about “students’ access to no-fee ATMs, schools’ influence over students’ banking and payment choices,...more
Many retailers and OEMs have engaged banks to provide private-label credit to their individual and small-business customers, or have joined with banks in offering them cobranded general-purpose credit. Many other...more
Online marketplaces increasingly use consumer reports to match consumers with retailers that offer products and services that may be of interest to them....more
One of PLA’s missions is to facilitate knowledge-management for payments practitioners. Pursuant to that mission, PLA is today posting four fundamental, but not always easily accessed, authorities regarding GLBA privacy and...more
PLA today posts the public version of the agreement pursuant to which Chase invested in the Target card portfolio in 2008. Although no longer in effect, this agreement may be a source of useful ideas for future...more