Payments News Update – July 11, 2025
Legal and Regulatory Developments
SPOTLIGHT:
The Hill – July 8, 2025
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) “click-to-cancel” rule was struck down by an appeals court on Tuesday, just days before it was set to take effect.
The rule, announced in October 2024, would have required sellers to make it “as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up.”
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the FTC erred in its rulemaking process by failing to produce a preliminary regulatory analysis, a statutory requirement for rules whose annual effect on the national economy would exceed $100 million. . . .
Reuters – July 10, 2025
Apple, Visa and Mastercard have persuaded a U.S. judge to dismiss a lawsuit accusing them of conspiring to suppress competition in the payments network market and causing merchants to pay inflated transaction fees.
U.S. District Judge David Dugan in Illinois ruled on Wednesday that the merchants had not provided enough evidence to support their claim that Apple illegally declined to launch a competing payment network to rival Visa and Mastercard.
Dugan found that the plaintiffs offered only “a slew of circumstantial allegations,” but allowed them to amend their lawsuit to strengthen their claims. . . .
Law360 – July 9, 2025 (subscription required)
According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, junk fees account for tens of billions of dollars in revenue for e-commerce businesses every year.
On May 12, the Federal Trade Commission’s “Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees” went into effect, targeting live-event ticketing and short-term lodging vendors specifically. This is a first step in a nationwide requirement for all businesses to advertise the true price of their goods and services and provide full pricing transparency.
These hidden charges are tacked on at the end of the online purchase flow, often with the clock ticking on both pricing and availability of the good or service, as a way to make their advertised pricing appear low initially and engage consumers in the purchase process. . . .
Payments Dive – July 8, 2025
U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California sent letters — dated July 1 — to six of the seven banks that own Early Warning Services, the fintech company that operates Zelle, asking how they track fraud on the platform and what they are doing about it.
A separate letter was sent to JPMorgan Chase, which announced in February that it would stop approving Zelle payments that originate on social media sites like Facebook.
“We write to request information regarding Bank of America’s most recent efforts to protect consumers from scams and fraud on peerto-peer (P2P) payment platforms, including Zelle,” the members of Congress, who are all Democrats, wrote in the letter addressed to the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank. . . .
Industry Developments
SPOTLIGHT:
Digital Transactions News – July 9, 2025
QR code payments have taken a big step towards becoming not only a mainstream payment option but also one that can accelerate the adoption of real-time payments. Late last week, the technology was used to facilitate a transaction over the FedNow network using the X9 standard.
The demonstration transferred funds in one second from a credit union to a Top 4 bank in the United States. During the test, a bill was presented to a payer with a merchant-generated QR code. Upon scanning the code, the payer authorized the transaction via the payer’s credit union’s mobile app. . . .
Payments Dive – July 9, 2025
Visa, the largest U.S. card network, and its No. 2 rival, Mastercard, took the Treasury Department’s new payments modernization initiative as an opportunity to pitch services.
The department embarked on the effort this year after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March calling on the federal government to shift almost exclusively to using electronic payments by the end of September. That means ditching paper checks for U.S. payments as well as U.S. collections from taxpayers and others.
The Trump administration has pointed to several key benefits to pushing government payments into the electronic realm. Chief among them are increasing the efficiency of payments and reducing costs, but there was also an emphasis on reducing the impact of check fraud. . . .
Digital Transactions News – July 7, 2025
Scams continue to get top billing when it comes to favored fraud attempts, closely followed by account takeovers, finds the NiCE Actimize U.S. version of its Fraud Insights Report.
Released Monday, the report found that, of the NiCE Actimize data analyzed, 57% of fraud attempts were scams with account takeovers accounting for 43% in 2024. That’s not much different from 2023, when the figures were 59% and 41%, respectively.
Digging deeper into three payment types included in the report, domestic wire, international wire, and Zelle peer-to-peer payments, data shows that account takeover accounts for 51% and scams for 49% of Zelle fraud attempts. . . .