Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A Martian travels to Earth and examines the U.S. payments system. He is perplexed by the dogged persistence in using a 40-year-old technology for payments cards by a nation that, in the same period, landed men on its...
This paper presents the 2008 version of the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), a nationally representative survey developed by the Consumer Payments Research Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and implemented by the RAND Corporation with its American Life Panel. The survey...
I. Introduction Consumer risks associated with unauthorized payment card usage have largely been assumed by others within the payment card matrix, leaving consumers mostly immune from financial liability. But related risks from unauthorized access to personal information remain as an important area of concern for...
Introduction The technological advances in the field of near-field contactless communications (NFC) and the development of sophisticated mobile applications have enabled mobile phones to become a potential means of payment. In 2009, more than two-thirds of the population worldwide was equipped with a mobile phone....
As payment cards have become an increasingly important electronic retail payment type in many countries, payment card fees, especially interchange fees, have become the source of a good deal of controversy. The interchange fee is used by card networks, such as MasterCard and Visa, to...
Perhaps the most important long-term problem that the U.S. payments industry confronts is the possibility of a permanent shift away from credit card use. The last fifteen years have been characterized by routine use of credit cards as the dominant transaction vehicle, coupled with pervasive...
Bank debit cards may look like credit cards, but they certainly do not act like them when it comes to account overdrafts. This does not suggest that credit cards are better than debit cards, as complaints abound concerning the transparency of fees charged to consumers...
The rapid growth of mobile phone usage and the continuous rise in wireless coverage fuel the expectations that access to financial services through mobile phones could transform the way financial services are provided. The emergence of new and more efficient business models can potentially resolve...
June 30, 2007 was a big day for data security. That was the deadline for organizations that store, process, or transmit credit card payments to be in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). As the deadline approached, the media reported...