Letting your bank handle credit card processing may seem convenient--but that convenience comes at a price.
Visa and MasterCard have rules that require retailers to handle credit cards the same way in all of their stores across the country.
The Produce Palace, a retailer in Michigan, brought the first millennium-bug case to court earlier this year, suing the makers of its sales terminals because the terminals cannot handle credit cards that expire after 1999.
Sail goes more directly for Square's jugular, using its own plug-in dongle to handle major credit card payments in your local coffee shop or a mid-sized outlet.
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Just as PCI demands rigorous security practices from those who handle consumer credit card data, regulations can demand a similar level of competence from companies that collect and mine user contextual data.
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Or the Federal Reserve could add to the alphabet soup of lifelines created in the last year to handle the credit crisis, including a variety of auction and loan programs to help banks deal with troubled balance sheets.
Paulson, plucked last year to lead Treasury after a successful, and lucrative, career at the helm of Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ), pressed through the fall to get a handle on the credit crisis, though some say not quickly enough.
That is what happens at call centres, where agents handle everything from late credit-card payments to complaints about software.
If Works could link up with Visa, companies could use credit cards to handle purchases without worrying about wanton overspending.
The drivers are getting ripped off but they do not fully understand it because they are unaware of what the cab companies are actually paying their credit card processor to handle the transaction.
The research agency Forrester says NFC has only had a limited impact to date as retailers have been put off by the cost of the equipment and the prospect of having to pay a new fee to banks and credit card companies that handle the transactions.
Nippon Credit Bank has tied up with Bankers Trust to securitize troubled assets and help handle foreign operations.
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