Do you feel annoyed when having decided what to buy, you get to the checkout only to find out that the price has increased because the merchant slapped an extra fee for paying by card? I know, I do. The card networks know that as well, which is why they have been insisting on a “no surcharge” rule – i.e. [...]

Last Friday, the press began reporting about a major data breach at Global Payments, a large US card processor. As always in the early stages of such events, there were plenty of rumours and speculation with various sources reporting stolen card numbers to be as low as 50,000 or as high as 10 million. This [...]

Last week Zil Bareisis posted a great blog entry regarding American Express’ Tweet Your Way to Savings Program. It’s a mighty interesting concept and provides quick cash back rewards to cardholders. It raises a few relevant questions for me: Are social rewards a passing fad? While this Amex/Twitter hookup received a fair bit of attention [...]

Just before the country stopped to celebrate Christmas, the UK Treasury announced that the government plans to ban the ‘excessive’ fees for card payments before the end of 2012. Essentially, this is the ban for card surcharging, i.e. fees that get added to the transaction if the person chooses to pay by card. Unfortunately, in [...]

In my last blog post, I talked about a Lloyds TSB Airmiles Duo card, which gives the customers a choice of using either MasterCard or American Express card for their purchases. I believe this is an example of a broader trend in card issuing – giving the customers more control. Here are a couple of [...]

TD Canada Trust recently launched an interesting web site called Shop MyAXS. It is an online shopping site that can be accessed only by TD Visa cardholders. In order to purchase an item, the user must enter their TD Visa account number and create a username and password. The site claims to offer savings of [...]

Large credit card issuers have been given relatively free rein in the past. That has now come to an end with recent legislation. Double cycle billing is now over. According to the American Banker, “The statute allows card companies to increase rates on existing balances only when a payment is 60 days or more late, [...]