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Commentary » PYMNTS Voice
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s payment network consolidation in the US and Europe, resulted in a world with only 3 global credit card brands – Visa, MasterCard and American Express, supported by a host of regional/ local debit solutions. However, the desire to avoid the dominance of US brands and expand their domestic card markets, has driven players in China, India and Europe to contemplate their own competitive card schemes to compete with the global dominance of Visa, Mastercard and American Express.
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Its head has gotten bigger and the tail longer and skinner. I'm not talking about a scary monster but about the distribution of purchasing volume for the credit and debit card issuers in the United States.
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.
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.
The payments industry had quite a decade. In a few days we will be saying goodbye to the first decade of the 21st century. What better time to take a look at the events that have shaken up the payments industry since 2000. Back at the turn of the century MasterCard and Visa were bank-owned associations, knee deep in litigation. Debit cards were growing rapidly and online was still a scary frontier with security concerns and fraud. People weren't paying for anything with a mobile phone and contactless payment was still something only used in exotic locales like Hong Kong.
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:
A few years ago, in response to a growing number of data security breaches, the major credit card brands formed the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). Since then the PCI SSC has developed a set of security requirements for all businesses that handle payment cards.
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