Over the last decade, consumers have tripled their use of credit cards as more merchants have increased their acceptance of them. This increase suggests that incentives in today's marketplace favor greater credit card use by consumers and acceptance by merchants. In this paper, we study the set...

A number of recent initiatives have encouraged use of debit cards and ACH debits/credits for Internet sales transactions. This paper outlines the different statutory and regulatory protections available to consumers and financial institution based upon the method by which payment is made.

In recent years, the financial services industry has become very inventive around new uses of technology to improve the structure and delivery of retail products. One relatively new type of payment product, stored value cards (SVCs), serves as a cash or check alternative. At this point in the...