In recent years, manufacturers of payment cards have created products that offer blind and visually impaired cardholders more comfortable ways to facilitate transactions. These products relied on tactile innovations in the standard payment card form.
The largest global networks of merchant acceptance locations belonged to Visa and Mastercard at the end of the third quarter of 2022. Both can firmly identify more than 80 million in-store and online outlets and micromerchants that use smartphones or handheld tablets to accept card payments.
Spending for goods and services—purchase volume—initiated by the 150 largest issuers of debit cards combined reached $11.164 trillion in 2021, an increase of 12.9% over 2020.
JCB is Japan’s largest merchant acquirer. It will be the first company in that country to test acceptance of a simulated central bank digital currency (CBDC) in retail stores using existing card payment infrastructure.
Spending for goods and services—purchase volume—initiated by credit cards issued by the 150 largest portfolios worldwide reached $12.695 trillion in 2021. This was up 9.4% from $11.605 trillion in 2020.
Walmart offers consumers connected to the FIS Premium Payback program real-time redemption of points awarded by their credit card and debit card issuer at its more than 4,700 stores in the US and Puerto Rico. Each of those stores has approximately 40 POS terminals.
Every time a card issuer examines a consumer’s prior history with credit products at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, in a process known as a hard inquiry, the consumer’s credit score is subject to being temporarily lowered up to five points by the bureaus.
Shipments of payment cards in 2021 by manufacturer were published in issue 1229. The table on the next page shows shipments by manufacturer of SIM cards, transportation/ticketing cards, private label prepaid cards, phone cards and nonpayment cards such as those for identification, access control, membership/loyalty, promotions, healthcare, driver’s licenses, etc.
From January 1 to June 30, 2022, Visa, UnionPay, Mastercard, JCB, Diners Club/Discover and American Express brand credit, debit and prepaid cards collectively generated 286.20 billion purchase transactions for goods and services worldwide. This was up 10.2% from the same period in 2021.
Nium is a global payment-as-a-service platform provider serving small and midsized companies that also offers API-based banking services. The company can make financial settlement on remittances and other payouts in 190 markets in local currency using its own bank accounts. Nium handled more than $8 billion in payments in 2021.
