Competitive Strategies

Giant pharmacy chain Walgreen Co. is getting into the banking and debit card business with the launch of Scarlet. Announced Thursday, Scarlet is a Mastercard-branded debit card issued by MetaBank. InComm Payments provides the system for the account. Scarlet works like most bank accounts and is designed to help accountholders …

U.S. consumers are spending $273 per month on subscription services on average, up 15% from the average in 2018, yet they estimate they are spending less, according to a poll from consulting firm West Monroe.Payments provider Nuvei Corp. completed its $250-million cash acquisition of SimplexCC Ltd., a cryptocurrency gateway that links exchanges, brokers, wallets, …

The Financial Data Exchange (FDX), a non-profit standards body for providers of open-banking and open-finance applications, announced on Wednesday that the number of consumer accounts using its application programming interface has swelled to 22 million, up from 16 million in April, an increase of more than one million accounts per …

Same-day transaction processing on the automated clearing house network will turn five years old this month, and while that may provide one reason for participants to celebrate, network governor Nacha issued another one Wednesday morning: both same-day transactions and same-day dollar volume are soaring. Transactions totaled 148.7 million in the …

Mercari, an online marketplace for second-hand goods, said consumers can use buy now, pay later services from Zip Co., formerly Quadpay, on its Web site.Buy now, pay later specialist Uplift Inc. said consumers who book with Sixthman, a music-festival organizer on cruise ships, can pay for their tickets in monthly installments. Sixthman is …

As part of its strategy to remove friction from automated bank transfers, Astra Inc., a provider of bank-to-bank transfer technology, is partnering with open-banking platform provider Plaid Inc. The partnership will make it easier for software developers to embed automated bank transfers into their applications by enabling them to use …

The emergence earlier this year of a virulent new coronavirus variant “threatens to reverse the gains made in the first six months of the year” by the U.S. restaurant industry, according to data released Tuesday by the National Restaurant Association. The news comes as eateries have adopted contactless forms of …

Apple Inc.’s App Store and the Google Play store will have to open their payments services to competing providers for in-app purchases in South Korea if a recently passed bill becomes law, reported The Wall Street Journal, which also said the president’s party endorsed the legislation. Apple, in particular, has been the …

Buy now, pay later specialist Affirm Inc. late Friday announced it had clinched the e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. as a client, securing a source of enormous volume and sending its stock soaring Monday morning. The news follows the enablement in May of Affirm’s service for hundreds of thousands of U.S. merchants …

Visa Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. said they will donate a dime to New York Cares through the month of September, up to a limit of $250,000, for each tap riders perform with a Chase Visa contactless card on subways or buses operated by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.VPay, …