Tag Archives: Durbin

ApplePay at Walmart

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Walmart announced yesterday that tap to pay arrives at select Walmart and Sam’s Club locations on August 24, with all US stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and fuel stations by mid 2027. The largest retailer in the country, and the last major holdout on contactless, is turning it on. What a great “going away” present to Jennifer Bailey!.

This is a bigger deal than the press release suggests. Walmart did not resist contactless because it disliked the technology. It resisted because contactless threatened a payment cost structure it spent twenty years building. The news here is not that Walmart added a feature. It is that Walmart concluded the feature no longer costs it anything.

For readers who want the plumbing, I laid out the EMVCo and tokenization dependencies in Understanding ApplePay in PIN Debit (May 2026). This post is the business version.

What I told Apple, repeatedly

Jennifer Bailey at Apple would always ask me the same question: “How can we get Mike [Cook] to accept ApplePay?” My answer never changed, I told her “It was not about Apple.” It was about three things:

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Are US Banks Really Considering a Durbin End Run with FISV’s Star?

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(Paid Subscriber Research)

Yesterday’s WSJ story that JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC have held “preliminary and tentative” talks to buy Fiserv’s Star debit network is being read as the opening shot in a big-bank campaign to escape Durbin. My first reaction: this is a bit of old news. Fiserv and its private equity suitors have been shopping Star as a spin-off for the better part of four years. Every time the pitch surfaces, the same five objections surface with it. Nothing about the current version of the deal has removed those objections; if anything, the political climate has made them harder.

Before I get to why I don’t believe it will happen, a quick refresher on the business logic, because that logic is real, and it explains why Fiserv can keep the pitch alive.

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Stablecoins Are Not Free — Why They Are A RAIL in Consumer Payments

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There’s a narrative running through payments circles right now that goes something like this: stablecoins will replace card rails because they’re cheaper, faster, and programmable. Stripe makes acceptance easy. Card networks are too slow to innovate. Machine-Machine payments need programmability. GENIUS Act passed. The future is obvious.

I’ve been writing about stablecoins for over two years, from the case for stablecoin as a trust platform to the ECB’s monetary sovereignty alarm. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion: stablecoins are not a replacement for cards, but rather another rail with cards retaining their role as the layer of abstraction for multiple networks (as they do today). They will do well where cards don’t play (micropayments, B2B and uncarded markets).

Here’s why (and why that matters more than you might think).

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Pay by Bank Double Whammy

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I’ve never been a fan of “Pay by Bank.” It’s a solution in search of a problem, especially when compared to the efficiency of debit cards and the global reach of Visa Direct. Now, two major developments have dealt a significant blow to the already weak business case for this payment method.

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Durbin Debit Fees Reduced

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In a significant ruling on yesterday (Aug 7)) U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Traynor struck down “swipe fees” cap that non-exempt banks can charge merchants for debit card transactions. The decision found that the Federal Reserve had exceeded its authority by allowing these fees to be higher than intended by law (ie include provisions for “fraud”).

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Durbin 2 – Short Update

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What are the new Durbin’s legislative prospects? A: Not at all likely (<10% probability)

Top retailers spent this week meeting with Bank CEOs trying to convince them to support the new Durbin legislation. Their pitch was to enable bi-lateral deals, “new products” and avoid network rules (see blog). Banks did not seem to bite, as they remembered the lessons of Durbin 1:

  • Only largest merchants benefited from dual routing
  • Consumers lost in debit rewards (ie keep the change), increased bank account fees, and no merchant pass-through of savings
  • Acquirers/processors did not pass through fee reductions to most merchants
  • Networks recovered lost revenue through merchant fees
  • Large banks lost competitive advantage as smaller “exempt” banks under $10B operated under different rules
  • See WSJ article

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Driving Vision of Durbin? Bi-Lateral Connections?

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I now have 70% confidence in the forces shaping Durbin (still no threat to V/MA). 

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