Consumer confidence in payment card systems has been built up over many decades. Cardholders expect to use their cards to execute payment instructions in a reliable and timely manner. Data breaches that degrade the perceived safety and reliability of payment cards may weaken consumer confidence...

Fraud alerts — initial fraud alerts, extended fraud alerts, and credit freezes — help protect consumers from the consequences of identity theft. At the same time, they may impose costs on lenders, credit bureaus, and, in some instances, consumers. We analyze a unique data set of anonymized...

The Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Center for Financial Services Innovation conducted this research project using transaction-level data provided by Meta Payment Systems in an effort to develop a better understanding of how consumers use prepaid cards by...

Public data, proprietary issuer data, and data collected by the author from a review of over 150 lender-borrower contracts from 15 of the largest issuers in the U.S. suggest that, over the past 10 years, credit card issuers have drastically changed the way that they price their product. This...

This is the second in a series of three papers that examines the protections available to users of various electronic payment vehicles who fall victim to fraud, discover an error on their statement, or have a dispute with a merchant after making a purchase. Specifically, it examines the federal...

Credit cards provide benefits to consumers and merchants not provided by other payment instruments as evidenced by their explosive growth in the number and value of transactions over the last 20 years. Recently, credit card networks have come under scrutiny from regulators and antitrust...

On November 27, 2007, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia invited Jennifer Tescher, director, and Arjan Schütte, associate director, of the Center for Financial Services Innovation, to present a workshop. The Center asked Tescher and Schütte to share CFSI’s...

The identity theft forum sponsored by the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Gartner Fellows Program brought together a broad range of stakeholders to discuss the important issue of identity theft. Participants from the financial services and merchant...

Despite a statutory definition of identity theft, there is a continuing debate on whether differences among the financial frauds associated with identity theft warrant further distinction and treatment, not only by lenders and financial institutions but also by consumers and regulatory and law...

On July 20, 2001 the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia sponsored a workshop on the consumer credit counseling service industry. Leading the moderated discussion were four senior executives from regional credit counseling firms associated with the National...