Competitive Strategies

Driven by a surge in business-to-business and health-care claims payments, transactions on the nation’s automated clearing house network swelled 7.7% year-over-year in the third quarter, according to Nacha, the organization that governs the network. Transactions totaled 7.3 billion, up by 520 million, while dollar volume totaled $18.1 trillion, a 13/8% …

Paysafe Ltd. said it relaunched its U.S. partner program for independent sales organizations, independent software vendors, and financial institutions.Anaheim Arena Management, manager of the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif., has selected SpotOn Transact Inc.’s Appetize unit to manage all concessions through cloud technology. The move comes in advance of the new National Hockey …

The movement to speed up cross-border payments received another boost Monday as Mastercard Inc. announced the integration of Mastercard Cross-Border Services, the card network’s global push payments platform, with Previse Ltd.’s InstantPay platform.  The cross-border payments integration, which leverages machine learning, will enable companies to identify invoices likely to be …

In a move aimed in part at accommodating digital-only financial institutions, Visa Inc. on Saturday opened its ReadyLink prepaid top-up network for the first time to debit cards. “The expansion makes Visa ReadyLink available to all consumer and business debit cards. The service is optional and issuers need to opt-in,” …

Fiserv Inc. announced the acquisition of BentoBox, a specialist in online restaurant platforms and technology. BentoBox serves more than 14,000 restaurant locations. Terms were not disclosed.Mindbody, a payments and technology platform for the fitness industry, announced it has closed on its acquisition of ClassPass, a monthly subscription service also focused on …

The global shortage of semiconductor chips that’s plaguing the makers of point-of-sale terminals and other payment devices has left at least one technology firm sitting pretty, its founder and chief executive says. “It’s wind in our sails,” says Sam Shawki, chief executive of MagicCube Inc. That’s because MagicCube’s technology enables …

VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings, a special-purpose acquisition company, announced its shareholders approved VPC’s acquisition of Bakkt, thus taking the digital-asset marketplace public.Payments-technology provider Worldnet Payments said it is the first integrated payments platform to complete a Level III EMV and contactless certification of Ingenico’s Self Series of devices. Ingenico is a unit of Worldline S.A.Payments …

As part of its strategy to support application developers, open-banking platform provider Plaid Inc. this week introduced at its developer conference several tools to help developers create a broader range of financial technology applications regardless of the programming language developers use. The new suite of tools include Plaid Pattern apps, which …

In a deal that could have important implications for payments providers like Square Inc. and Stripe Inc., the United Kingdom’s SumUp Inc. early Thursday announced it has acquired Fivestars Loyalty Inc., a San Francisco-based payment facilitator for some 12,000 small businesses. The acquisition, SumUp’s first in the U.S. market, calls …

As part of its strategy to automate payouts for health-care and property-and-casualty carriers, Echo Health Inc., a provider of payment technology to insurance carriers, is partnering with KyckGlobal Inc. to enable claimants to receive payments digitally through PayPal, Venmo, push to card through Visa Direct, and the automated clearing house. …