Credit card surcharges have become a familiar sight at restaurants, service businesses, and retail counters. For merchants facing rising costs and processing fees, it’s easy to see why: instead of absorbing the entire credit card swipe fee, pass some of it to the customer who chooses to use one. Simple enough, until the lawyers get […]
A customer taps their card, the receipt prints, and the line moves. Nobody thinks twice about it. But behind that five-second transaction, the card number passes through a terminal, a POS system, a gateway, a processor, some logs, maybe a backup file. Every handoff is a place that data might be protected, stored, or exposed. […]
A growing wave of state laws is telling merchants that “digital-first” and “cashless” aren’t the same thing. Walk into a bodega in Buffalo and try to pay for your sandwich with a $20 bill. A few years ago, plenty of stores, avoiding the headaches and hygiene of cash payment, might have pointed you toward the […]
A few years ago, artificial intelligence in the payments space was mostly a back-office story. Fraud models. Risk scores. A little automation in customer service. Useful for sure, but invisible to most merchants and cardholders. That’s no longer the case. In the past two years, AI has moved from a quiet efficiency tool to a […]
Last year, we wrote about the great regulatory rollback that defined 2025: a neutered CFPB, BNPL regulations reversed before the ink dried, and a crypto market emboldened by a White House that finally had its back. If 2024 was the year of the regulatory crackdown, 2025 was the year Washington put the brakes on. So, […]
Not every deal needs a long sales cycle, a full demo, and three follow-ups. Some opportunities are obvious the moment you walk in the door. If you know what to look for, you can identify a strong POS prospect in under five minutes—often before you even introduce yourself. These businesses already feel the friction. They’re […]
For small businesses, getting paid has always been a balancing act. You want to make things easy for your customers, but you also need systems that are reliable, trackable, and fast. You also want simplicity, not tracking fifteen different channels, each with its own systems for CRM and transaction data. For a long time, those […]
In last year’s regulatory outlook, the payments industry was still digesting the early signals of a second Trump administration: a hollowed-out CFPB, a pause on aggressive fee rules, and a widely questioned proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. As we move into 2026, the contours of the new regulatory approach are clearer. […]
In 2025, COCARD did what it does best. In an increasingly competitive and consolidated payments landscape, our focus remained clear: expand our reseller network, empower our member-owners, and enhance the value we deliver to merchants through strong partnerships, reliable technology, and elite service. As the industry consolidates, and as merchants and customers continue to raise […]
In 2025, Embedded finance has taken over basically every consumer industry. Whether you recognize the term, you’ve almost certainly seen embedded financial platforms on your favorite e-commerce site or even at physical checkout. Let’s dive into how embedded finance has changed the game, and how merchants of any size can use it to drive higher […]