Past Articles
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The MAG as a Critical Resource in the Payments Space
Dec 5, 2019Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores is family owned and operated and began in 1964 with a single gas station in Watonga, Oklahoma. Over the last 55 years, Love’s has grown into one of the nation’s leading retailers of motor fuels and related products and services, operating 500 locations in 41 states. Love’s joined the MAG in August of 2012. Stewart Terbush, Director of Operations Accounting at Love’s considers the MAG to be a critical resource to drive success in the payments space. We asked Stewart to share his insights on Love’s relationship with the MAG, and how that relationship creates value for all concerned. Click here to read what Stewart and the team at Love’s has to say about their experiences with the MAG.
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Don't Delay...No Delay
Dec 3, 2019As another year comes to an end, retailers are heads down on the holiday shopping season, competing fiercely to attract and retain customers and drive towards their annual profit goals, while making sure their people and systems can handle the high transaction volumes during this peak period. Complicating matters is the increasing risk of losses due to ever increasing payment fraud.
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Enhanced Security or Alternative Routing – Why Should Merchants Have to Choose?
Sep 5, 2019 byLaura TownsendThe U.S. market offers a wide variety of competitive alternative networks to which merchants can route debit transactions that can deliver a reduced cost of payment acceptance. Yet there are barriers in the market. What is the opportunity and the considerations?
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EMV Liability Shift 2.0
Sep 5, 2019If you thought the shifting of fraud liability from the issuers to the merchants was complete, it must mean you don’t operate a fuel station. When the original date was set for the implementation of EMV in 2015, EMVCo made an exception for automated fuel pump transactions. The delayed liability shift date for outside pumps at fuel stations is October 2020 due to the complexities of updating the pumps. As the date approaches, the industry grapples with many issues on implementation, and one must consider if the date is still too aggressive.
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Installment Payments – Who Stands to Benefit?
Sep 5, 2019As point-of-sale installment payments become more prevalent in the United States, it is worth examining the various models for installment payments and understanding how installments in international markets have evolved. When evaluating installment payment programs, it is important to understand the costs and benefits for all stakeholders, including consumers, merchants, and banks.
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Why Mobile Payments Don’t Deliver for Merchants
Aug 26, 2019Mobile payments so far account for a mere 2% or less of U.S. general-purpose card payments, according to some estimates, and that’s no surprise to some executives who believe mobile payments haven’t delivered for many merchants.
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MAG Supports Federal Reserve’s Involvement in Faster Payments
Aug 5, 2019Merchants encourage the Fed to collaborate with payments stakeholders when developing and operating their new real-time payments rail.
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Merger, Merger, Merger – What Does it Mean for the Merchant?
Jun 6, 2019Should merchants expect upsides or shortcomings as a result of the ongoing merger activity across the payments industry? Or will merchants feel little impact of the continued consolidation? It is tough to decide how this will all play out but one thing we can be sure of is that this industry movement will continue.
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United We Stand or Divided We Pay: Checking/ACH payment Conversions to Virtual Cards
Jun 6, 2019There are many large companies profiting from the practice of intercepting checking account bill payments and converting them to Virtual Cards. The practice is pretty simple, companies pay kickbacks to bill payment processors to process their checking account payments. Instead of sending the payments as electronic checks to merchant electronic lockboxes like most large reputable banks, the companies have bots set up to pump Virtual Card payments in at merchant websites and IVRs. They do this for one reason – to profit off the near 3% interchange fees.
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Encryption: A Primer on Some of the Benefits, Limitations and Considerations
Jun 6, 2019According to Gemalto’s Breach Level Index website, since 2013 more than 14.7 billion records were lost or stolen and only 4% of breaches involved systems where encryption was utilized. Said another way, that equates to 73 records per SECOND in that span. Now, it’s safe to say that most merchants want to secure their customer’s sensitive payment data and all merchants want to avoid being the subject of the next breaking news story on customer data breaches.
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Payment implications of XS2A: potential benefits for both consumers and merchants
Jun 6, 2019Merchants are asking questions about PSD2. Rightfully so—the initiative is transforming payments across the European market. With these new regulations taking place, what are some of the payment implications and what do they mean for businesses and consumers?
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Payment Standard - Relevance to Merchants
Mar 7, 2019Standards in the payments industry are designed and published by various bodies. Often the day to day engagement with those standards organizations requires a level of technical expertise. However, it is of critical importance to ensure business intelligence is layered on top to influence the technical design. Retailers, financial institutions, and service providers alike that deliver experiences to their customers must engage in the evolution of payment standard design. Your customers are worth it.
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Contactless 3.0
Mar 7, 2019We all remember the promises when contactless was first issued over a decade ago on cards in the United States - it was going to revolutionize the checkout process. We were told not only would contactless improve the checkout experience but somehow it was also going to increase the average purchase and frequency of our customers. Several issuers spent the additional money to include the contactless chip on cards but not many merchants saw the benefit of adding new technology to the checkouts.
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Protecting Your Most Valuable Currency - Data
Mar 7, 2019With fraud losses in the U.S. reaching a staggering $24.B in recent years, merchants undoubtedly understand the importance of prioritizing and maintaining laser-sharp focus on cybersecurity to avoid becoming another data breach statistic. News stories are plentiful with examples of businesses across almost every industry experiencing security breaches, which affirms the unfortunate reality that no business is too big or too small to become the target of a cyberattack.
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The Rush to Implementation - Who Benefits?
Dec 6, 2018We have seen a number of new payment products, solutions, and initiatives either announced or commercialized in 2018, including Visa Claims Resolution, MasterCom Claims Manager, Secure Remote Commerce, EMV 3DS (ie. 2.0), and 3DS related compliance programs to name just a few. What is the merchant sentiment when it comes to these new offerings?
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Mixed reviews for Visa's new chargeback process
Dec 6, 2018It might be too early to determine the full impact of the new Visa Claims Resolution process designed to streamline and limit chargebacks, but 52 percent of respondents surveyed claimed no decrease in chargebacks since VCR, and most of the 33 percent reporting a decline cited a decrease of less than 5 percent.
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Report Urges New Fraud Management Solutions as Global Card Fraud Patterns Shift
Dec 6, 2018Merchant Advisory Group (MAG) and CMSPI launch retail payments fraud investigation, with support from Fiserv.
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A Guide to Visa and Mastercard's New Mandate for Stored Payment Credentials
Sep 6, 2018How Visa and Mastercard’s new mandates for Stored-Credential transactions effect ecommerce merchants and what you need to do to ensure compliance. These days, more ecommerce businesses are storing their customers' credit card numbers and other payment credentials to make it easier to process automated or recurring charges for things like subscriptions and one-click shopping. Visa and Mastercard are introducing new guidelines this year for how merchants should handle stored payment credentials.
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PSD2 – The Changes and Opportunities Explained
Sep 6, 2018PSD2 is set to shake up the payment sector, so how will that affect you as a merchant or marketplace? Worldpay and its PSD2 expert, Charles Damen, are here to guide you through the changes and opportunities PSD2 is set to bring.
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MAG CEO John Drechny: The Federal Reserve must develop a real-time payments rail
Jul 31, 2018Customer experience throughout one’s shopping experience is a priority for merchants. Competition, transparency, choice, security, safety, and balanced liability all play an important role in merchants’ payments considerations as they seek to make the customer’s payment experience fast and easy.
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