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- ADDING MULTIMEDIA Ross-Simons Jewelers Kicks Off New Web Video Series With Celebrity “Stylist to the Stars” Phillip Bloch
- Mintz Levin Ranks in Top Five Underwriter’s Counsel in Q1 2012, According to The Bond Buyer
- S&P Capital IQ Initiates Coverage on Xplore Technologies Corp. in Standard & Poor’s Factual Stock Reports
- A.M. Best Affirms Ratings of Sammons Financial Group, Inc. and Its Subsidiaries
- A.M. Best Affirms Ratings of Sooner Insurance Company
PYMNTS Voice
Commentary » PYMNTS Voice
It's Time to Take the Thumb Off of Consumer and Business Borrowing to Get the Economy Moving Again
Revitalizing credit, creating jobs, and stimulating the U.S. economy was the subject of a panel that I participated in last week at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Capital Markets Summit. A lot of people have said that businesses — especially small ones — can't get credit. A big question for the panel was whether that's really true. Here's what I said.
Collateral Damage from the Financial Crisis: Consolidation and Regulation
The decade ended with the start of the most severe financial crisis the world has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In many respects the payments industry was rock solid during the meltdown. The payment systems processed transactions without losing a beat. While consumers faced a real risk that they would find their retirement accounts dry, and not a banker in town would be willing to give them a loan, they had full confidence that they could pay merchants with any tender type that merchant usually took. Pure payments companies such as MasterCard and Visa not surprisingly held their value while most other stocks crashed.
How the World War on Interchange Fees Transformed the Card Industry
A global war on interchange fees raged during most of the decade and will continue into the next. We'll have to wait until next decade to find out who wins the war. But the war itself has already led to massive ramifications for the card business around the globe.
Should We Ban Credit Cards? The Radical Policies Advocated by Some Behavioral Economics Scholars
In the previous two entries in this series I introduced you to the field of behavioral economics and then described some of the empirical work and insights from this new field. Unfortunately for those in the payments business, behavioral economics is also used to advocate regulations and other government interventions into this industry. In Making Credit Safer, for example, Professors Bar-Gill and Warren argue that "[m]any consumers are uninformed and irrational," "consumers make systematic mistakes in their choice of credit products and in the use of these products," regulations should adopt a number of "behaviorally informed" policies designed to address the consequences of consumer ignorance and irrationality.
GAO to Congress on Interchange Fee Regulation: Yellow Light
Last week the General Accountability Office (GAO) released it much awaited report on interchange fees. Congress had asked the GAO, the respected investigative arm of Congress, to wade into this battle between merchants and cards systems earlier this year when it passed the CARD Act. There's something for everyone in this report which is why both merchant and cardholder advocates are claiming that it backs their positions. Here's what GAO finds:
Insights into Consumer Use of Financial Products: Payoffs from the New Behavioral Economics
I talked about behavioral economics in my last blog. Some of the top minds in that field are studying how consumers use financial products. They aren't doing this to provide any business advice. Instead, financial products provides them with neat laboratory for testing some of their theories on how consumers make decisions about complicated products that involve some discounting of future costs and benefits. But some of the studies are interesting for those of us in the payment biz. All of them are based on conducting real-world experiments where people are offered financial products under different terms. Then the authors compare a test group with a control group.
How Credit Card Reform Impacts What's Next in Payments
I was recently quoted in a Business Week article on October 29th, "Interchange Fees Make Strange Bedfellows" by Brian Burnsed.
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- S&P Capital IQ Initiates Coverage on Xplore Technologies Corp. in Standard & Poor’s Factual Stock Reports 1 hour ago
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