Competitive Strategies

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. …

Shop Bonsai Inc., which provides in-app checkout technology under the Bonsai moniker, said it and buy now, pay later specialist Afterpay are making it easier for consumers to shop on an online publisher’s site without leaving the site. Announced Wednesday, the arrangement enables Bonsai shoppers to potentially reduce the checkout …

Insurer Alliance Global Corporate & Specialty issued a report detailing how companies can protect their systems from an epidemic of ransomware attacks. Such attacks increased 62% in the first half 2021, year-over-year, following a 20% rise for all of 2020, according to FBI statistics cited by Alliance.Online gifting platform SmartGift said it is …

Despite consumers’ expectation that checkout during an e-commerce purchase should be fast and instinctive, most online merchants still have checkout procedures that add unnecessary friction, says a survey from online-payments powerhouse Stripe Inc. The report, released Tuesday, reveals that 96% of 200 North American e-commerce merchants surveyed had committed at …