Competitive Strategies

American Express Co. said its Kabbage unit now offers Kabbage Checking to U.S. small businesses. AmEx also said it now offers Kabbage Funding to small businesses with lines of credit ranging from $1,000 to $150,000.Global Payments Inc. has launched a point-of-sale application that operates on commercially-available, off-the-shelf mobile phones, reported The Paypers …

Widespread theft of online data is driving businesses to seek out alternatives to passwords and usernames for sensitive information, a demand that led point-of-sale device provider MagTek Inc. to develop technology that helps lock up data while taking the company into a new and broader market, which includes medical data, …

Consumers are increasingly turning to online banking as their only method of banking, says a recent study from J.D. Power. In 2020, the number of consumers that only bank online grew 11%. Overall, 41% of consumers in the United States are digital-only banking customers.   The online channel has also become a …

Payments provider Adyen NV announced the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has approved the company’s application for a federal foreign branch in San Francisco. The Federal Reserve granted its approval in May. Adyen says the U.S. branch license will allow its single platform to scale and introduce more services for …

The Covid-19 pandemic has helped fuel consumer adoption of mobile-banking apps by 67% of retail bank customers in the United States, up seven percentage points from 2020. And now no significant drop in consumer usage of these apps is expected as Covid-19 restrictions ease, says the J.D. Power 2021 U.S. Banking …

Bank of America Corp.’s decision to introduce fast payouts to consumer accounts globally brings a major financial institution into a market that is attracting increasing interest from an array of payments providers. Pressure for such services has grown more intense with the growth of the gig economy and recent needs …

Fresha, a platform that enables consumers to book and pay for beauty and wellness appointments, received a $100-millon Series C investment led by General Atlantic.BitPay Inc. is processing transactions allowing users to spend cryptocurrency with Shells, a provider of cloud-based virtual desktop operating systems.The city of South Haven, Mich., has launched …

Heeding years-long requests from merchants for a solution to simplify sales-tax compliance, Stripe Inc. on Thursday introduced Stripe Tax, an application that allows merchants to automatically calculate and collect sales tax, value-added tax (VAT), and goods-and-services tax (GST) in the United States and more than 30 other countries. Spurring the need …

With e-commerce sales booming, payments players are looking for combinations that can keep online customers engaged and add even more buyers to their ranks.  An example emerged Thursday morning as Shopify Inc. and Affirm Inc. announced Affirm’s buy now, pay later service is now available to “hundreds of thousands” of U.S. …

Buy now, pay later provider Uplift Inc. said its service has been integrated with Vegas.com, a travel site.In related news, buy now, pay later provider Splitit said its service is now available on the ChargeAfter platform, which offers merchants a variety of consumer financing methods.Mastercard Inc. said it has closed on its $850-million acquisition of Ekata …