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Journal Article
Who Are the Unbanked? Characteristics Beyond Income
As the U.S. economy recovered from the Great Recession, more households entered the banking system. Still, 9 million households were unbanked in 2015. Understanding the characteristics of these households is critical in designing effective policies for financial inclusion. Policymakers often consider low income to be the defining characteristic of the unbanked. However, this broad characterization may mask large differences in banking status within low-income groups. {{p}} Fumiko Hayashi and Sabrina Minhas examine which household characteristics beyond income are associated with households? ...
Journal Article
The new debit card regulations: initial effects on networks and banks
American consumers are using debit cards more than ever before, triggering key changes in the payment card industry and affecting how banks and merchants do business. ; Controversy has arisen as the industry raised the fees it charges on merchants for debit transaction processing?fees that merchants may pass on to consumers, affecting the prices that consumers pay for goods and services. Congress and the Justice Department have stepped in with rules to cap certain fees and promote competition among card networks. ; In this first article of two, Hayashi finds the new regulations and legal ...
Working Paper
Faster payments in the United States: how can private sector systems achieve public policy goals?
Consumers and businesses are increasingly expecting faster payments. While many countries have already developed or are in process of developing faster payments, the availability of these payments is fragmented in the United States. The recently released paper by the Federal Reserve encourages private sector participants to provide faster payment services. However, private-sector faster payments systems will face significant challenges in achieving public policy goals of ubiquity, safety, and efficiency unless system governance represents broad public interests. One way to better align ...
Working Paper
Chargebacks: another payment card acceptance cost for merchants
Although chargebacks are perceived as one of the major cost components for merchants to accept card payments, little research has been conducted on them. To fill that gap, this paper describes the current chargeback landscape by generating detailed statistics on chargebacks for signature-based transactions. Our data are from merchant processors, which, altogether, processed more than 20 percent of all signature-based transactions in the United States. For Visa and MasterCard transactions, chargebacks merchants receive are, on average, 1.6 basis points (bps) of sales number and 6.5 bps of ...
Journal Article
Mobile Banking Use and Consumer Readiness to Benefit from Faster Payments
The U.S. payments industry is currently implementing faster payments that will enable consumers and businesses to send and receive payments almost instantly at any time of day, any day of the year. Mobile banking in particular may allow consumers to realize the full benefits of faster payments. As a result, a consumer’s use of mobile banking is a good indicator of their readiness to benefit from faster payments.Fumiko Hayashi and Ying Lei Toh examine which consumer characteristics are associated with mobile banking use as well as what other factors may influence consumer readiness. They ...
Working Paper
A puzzle of card payment pricing : why are merchants still accepting card payments?
This paper presents models that explain why merchants accept payment cards even when the fees they face exceed the transactional benefits they receive from a card transaction. Such merchant behaviors can be explained by competition among merchants and/or the effectiveness of the merchant?s card acceptance in shifting cardholders? demand for goods upward. The prevalent assumption used in payment card literature?merchants accept cards only when their transactional benefits are higher than the fees they pay?holds only for a monopoly merchant who faces an inelastic consumer demand. A card network ...
Journal Article
The new debit card regulations: effects on merchants, consumers, and payments system efficiency
Public authorities recently intervened in the U.S. payment card industry to address tensions over the growing fees charged to merchants for processing debit card transactions. In this second article of Hayashi's two-part series, the author reviews how regulatory changes have affected merchants, consumers and the overall efficiency of the nation's payments system. ; She finds that competition among card networks for merchants has risen, and the fees imposed on merchants have declined, on average. However, it is too soon to know whether consumers will reap benefit and whether the efficiency of ...
Journal Article
Payment Card Fraud Rates in the United States Relative to Other Countries since Migrating to Chip Cards
The United States has lagged somewhat behind other countries in implementing steps to mitigate payment card fraud, such as chip card technology and personal identification numbers. Small delays in implementing fraud mitigation strategies could translate to large fraud losses relative to other countries. Although comparing fraud rates across countries can be challenging, Fumiko Hayashi examines payment card fraud rates in the United States along with three countries with the best available data?Australia, France, and the United Kingdom?and finds that the United States has the highest overall ...
Working Paper
Product innovation and network survival in the U.S. ATM and debit card network industry
This paper studies product innovation and firm survival in the U.S. ATM/debit card industry. The industry started with a few shared ATM networks in the early 1970s. The number of networks grew quickly up until the mid 1980s, but then declined sharply. We construct a theoretical model based on Jovanovic and MacDonald (1994). In contrast to their model focusing on cost-saving technological innovation, our model shows a major product innovation may also trigger the shakeout. The theoretical predictions are tested using a novel dataset on network entry, exit, size, location, ownership and product ...
Briefing
Data Aggregators: The Connective Tissue for Open Banking
Open banking, which allows third-party financial apps to access consumer financial data electronically andsecurely, relies on data aggregators to establish connections with consumers’ financial institutions and extract consumer data. Data aggregators are critical to enhancing consumer financial services and increasing competition—both among financial service providers and across payment methods. However, their role raises some concerns related to data security, data privacy, and competition.