Acquiring

Online-payments provider Stripe Inc. now allows merchants on its platform to accept payments from Chinese consumers through links to the China-based Alipay and WeChat Pay systems, Reuters reported. At a valuation of $9.2 billion, 7-year-old Stripe is the most valuable privately held payments startup. Alibaba Group, the China-based online marketplace, has launched the Taobao Group …

Israelis are much more likely to use mobile-banking apps and mobile wallets than Americans, but at least Americans are less inclined to use cash than Germans, according to a recent international survey of consumer usage of financial technology. The May survey of 5,860 adults in the United States, United Kingdom, …

USA Technologies Inc., a provider of contactless-payment devices for vending machines, announced an expanded agreement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to market cashless-payment capability in self-serve markets. Fast-casual restaurant chain Panera Bread Co. gets more than a quarter of its orders through digital order-ahead transactions, and that excludes digital orders that are paid …

There’s nothing new about application programming interfaces. The code has been around for years, streamlining payments flows between otherwise unrelated apps. Recently, APIs have made possible the seamless integrations that mobile-payments users now take for granted. But now a group of payments executives are starting to worry that proprietary API …

The stock market has had a pretty good run so far this year, but shares of publicly traded payments firms are doing even better than the overall market. A group of thirty payment-related stocks tracked by Chicago-based Barrington Research Associates Inc. posted a mean return of 23.86% for the first …

Merchant cash-advance provider CAN Capital Inc. said it has returned to funding following a recapitalization by Varadero Capital, an alternative asset manager. CAN Capital said it will immediately begin funding small merchants eligible for renewal. It will work with a select set of sales partners for new merchant advances. Its products include term …

In a play for scale in a rapidly expanding e-commerce market, Vantiv Inc. on Wednesday agreed to buy the United Kingdom-based processor Worldpay Group plc for approximately $9.9 billion. JPMorgan Chase & Co., which had also expressed interest in Worldpay, has withdrawn from the bidding. The boards of the two …

What’s the measure of a well-performing payment gateway? Time. Or, rather a lack of time. Gateways, which route online transactions to one of multiple payment processors, are judged on their speediness and reliability. That’s why The Strawhecker Group, an Omaha, Neb.-based payments consultancy, started its Gateway Enterprise Metrics platform. The …

Puerto Rico-based payment processor Evertec Inc. completed its $38.5 million acquisition of Chile-based EFT Group S.A., which uses the PayGroup brand. PayGroup provides payment processing and software services to financial institutions throughout Latin America. Alipay, a mobile wallet used primarily in China and abroad by Chinese travelers, said Chinese food supplier Han Feng Inc., …

As Independence Day nears with all its festivities, fireworks stores are preparing for their largest selling season of the year with EMV chip card acceptance. It evoked a sigh of relief from Bill Weimer, vice president and general counsel of Phantom Fireworks, when the company’s point-of-sale system achieved EMV compliance. …