Competitive Strategies

InComm Payments announced Tuesday that its Visa-branded Vanilla Gift Cards can now be downloaded to Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay mobile wallets, enabling the card to be used for contactless payments. It is the first open-loop Visa gift card to be supported on mobile wallets, InComm says. In …

Capital One Financial Corp. is barring all of its credit cards from being used for point-of-sale lending transactions, aside from the United Kingdom where buy now, pay later products are being reviewed for possible regulation. The move comes as overall buy now, pay later providers garner a lot of attention, …

Wells Fargo Co. said overall levels of optimism among small businesses remain at just more than half where they were late last year, even though its Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index rose 12 points for the second straight quarter in the latest period.As local governments imposed measures to control fresh outbreaks …

Less than a week after announcing its partnership with Cybersource, Houston-based P97 Networks Inc.’s plans to expand its PetroZone platform globally are coming into sharper focus.  P97 intends to leverage Cybersource’s gateway connections to more than 140 acquiring banks globally to expand its reach to petroleum retailers. The company will …

A relatively novel method for private companies to go public gained momentum in the payments industry Monday with the announcement that London-based processor Paysafe Group Holdings Ltd. will be acquired by a group put together by Las Vegas-based Foley Trasimene Acquisition Corp. in a deal valued at approximately $9 billion.  …

Overall U.S. credit card use dipped 2% for the week ending Nov. 29 compared with the week ending Dec. 1, 2019, according to the Tracking Transaction Trends report from PSCU, a credit union service organization. Meanwhile, debit card use increased 4.9% for the same period. Regionally, the largest credit card drop was …

It’s a hot time for buy now, pay later companies, especially when buyers come around. Affirm Inc. is buying Canadian rival PayBright Inc. and Alliance Data Systems Corp. completed its acquisition of Bread, the brand ran by Lon Operations LLC. Buy now, pay later specialist Affirm Inc. said it will acquire …

At UL, we have seen both customers and merchants are experiencing an increased need for contactless payment options in brick-and-mortar stores. The current pandemic is a large factor in this, of course, but so also is the convenience and speed that contactless payments bring when compared to the traditional contact …

Processor Stripe Inc. launched Stripe Treasury, a banking-as-a-service platform for its merchants, which can open Stripe Balance business accounts. Stripe is working with Evolve Bank & Trust on the service. Merchants can open interest-bearing accounts eligible for FDIC insurance in minutes. Commerce platform Shopify Inc. is one of the first to offer …

Houston-based P97 Networks Inc., a provider of cloud-based mobile-commerce technology, including pay-at-pump, has partnered with Cybersource, Visa Inc.’s fraud-management platform, to expand its PetroZone platform offering to fuel retailers both in North America and overseas. P97 has installations in 140 countries. PetroZone is an EMV-compliant application that enables mobile payment …