The processing of retail payments has traditionally been the domain of regulated banks, but technologically sophisticated players like Venmo, AliPay, Bitcoin and Ripple (and potentially Facebook’s Libra) are making incursions into the market. Even within regulated banks, payments processing is...

Automatic payments are increasingly common. The psychologies of the prominent of number, defaults and inattention combine to create an unexpected side effect of automatic payments. We see that credit card holders set a default automatic payment to match their modal repayment behavior. For those...