The Payment Cards Center's September 2012 policy conference advanced the discussion of targeted design and outcome measurement as central features of public policy in the area of consumer financial protections. Speakers considered regulations addressing the disclosure of credit terms; standards...

Recently enacted federal legislation contains a number of provisions that will affect the prepaid card industry. This note highlights some of these provisions, discusses how they might shape the prepaid card industry, and outlines the debate over whether prepaid cards should be defined as...

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...

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 Friday, May 23, 2003, the Payment Cards Center hosted a workshop led by collections managers from J.P. Morgan Chase and Juniper Bank. The managers provided the credit card issuers' perspective on the consumer credit counseling industry. The day's discussion complemented an earlier workshop at...

America’s small businesses have adopted credit cards as both a payment method and a borrowing vehicle. The segment also uses other payment card products, including debit, charge, and prepaid cards. The dollar volume of spending with cards designed for small businesses increased by 230 percent...

Many factors influence credit-card-issuing banks’ decisions about how to fund credit card loans. These factors include the size and structure of the institution, economic conditions, and the regulatory environment. Against the backdrop of a much smaller market for credit card asset-backed...

Over the past decade many of the nation's largest public transit providers have gone from fare-payment systems based on cash and coin to more modern electronic systems that implement payment cards, including agency-issued prepaid cards, credit cards, and debit cards. On September 16, 2008, the...

For two decades, Visa Inc. has contracted with a market research firm to gather detailed information from U.S. consumers about the forms of payment they use when carrying out transactions at many types of merchants. This omnibus project, the Visa Payment Panel Study, has recorded the migration...

This paper uses tradeline-level credit card data to examine initial credit limits and early credit limit increases before and after the Great Recession and implementation of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act of 2009 (the CARD Act). I compare two vintages of...