Authors' note: This paper reports on a research effort by Federal Reserve staff to examine market structure implications in the still‐emerging faster payments market. The analysis and conclusions in this paper are those of the authors and do not indicate official positions of the Board of...

The U.S. payments industry is in the process of developing ubiquitous, safe, faster electronic solutions for making a broad variety of business and personal payments. How this market for faster payments will evolve will be shaped by a range of economic forces, such as economies of scale and...

Today's consumer has access to more payment instruments than consumers of just a few years ago. As the number of available payment methods increases, so does the need to understand why consumers adopt certain payment instruments, how consumers choose to pay for purchases, which consumers make...

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. payment system has undergone a transformation featuring a significant decline in the use of paper checks that is quite uneven across consumers and not well understood. This paper shows that characteristics of payment instruments are the most important determinants...

Consumer payments in the United States gradually have been shifting away from paper checks for the past several years. Cash use has declined as well, although at a much slower pace. As the number of check payments has decreased, those payments have been replaced with electronic and card...

Using data from the United States and Canada, we quantify consumers’ net pecuniary cost of using cash, credit cards, and debit cards for purchases across income cohorts. The net cost includes fees paid to financial institutions, rewards received from credit or debit card issuers, and the...

The Emerging Payments Research Group (EPRG) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston sponsored a new conference, "Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice: How and Why Do Consumers Choose Their Payment Methods?" on October 27-28, 2005, at the Boston Fed. The conference brought together a diverse set of...

We use novel datasets from multiple sources to quantify U.S. and Canadian consumers’ net pecuniary costs of making payments at the point of sale across income cohorts. The net costs include merchants’ cost of accepting payments that is passed on to consumers as higher retail prices, payment...

The Credit CARD Act of 2009 was intended to prevent practices in the credit card industry that lawmakers viewed as deceptive and abusive. Among other changes, the Act restricted issuers' account closure policies, eliminated certain fees, and made it more difficult for issuers to change terms on...