Competitive Strategies

As the economy registers a tentative recovery from the deep recession caused by Covid-19, payments networks are doing likewise. This is probably no more true than with American Express Co., whose concentration in the travel-and-entertainment market caused the company’s financials to nosedive earlier this year as the pandemic grounded airlines, …

Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit announced it is enabling shopping and purchasing within its Gmail email service via an agreement with Skipify Inc., a payments provider that relies on artificial intelligence technology.North Lane Technologies, formerly Wirecard North America Inc., and daVinci Payments have banded together to create Syncapay Inc., a holding company for payment-technology …

Strange times. Seemingly overnight, one of the most durable and heavily weighted key performance indicators (KPIs) for the quality and valuation of traditional, brick-and-mortar merchant-acquiring portfolios has lost its salience. Its meaningfulness has gone from a primary driver of value to a mere footnote.  Not everyone will agree. But when …

Alliance Data Systems Corp., a provider of loyalty and marketing services, is moving its nearly 24-year-old in-house private-label card processing operations to Fiserv Inc. The move is part of Alliance Data’s strategy of investing in the development of new digital services for its customers, such as offering credit options to …

As Covid-19 cases spike around the country, grocers and technology companies alike are scrambling to blunt the pandemic’s financial impact. On Thursday, the online delivery service Instacart announced it is starting a program with the grocery chain Aldi to allow recipients of federal SNAP benefits to use their electronic benefit …

Discover Financial Services reported its payment-services volume totaled $69.7 billion in the third quarter, up 11% year-over-year. Volume on the Pulse debit network increased 16% to $55 billion owing to larger average spending due to the pandemic and to the lift from stimulus funds.Payments provider PaymentCloud Inc. said it acquired contactless technology startup …

Visa Inc. on Wednesday announced the rollout in 15 geographic markets of Visa Tap to Phone, which allows consumers to initiate a transaction simply by tapping a contactless card to a merchant’s NFC-enabled mobile device.  Tap to Phone is now live in numerous countries throughout Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia …

PayPal Holdings Inc. announced a service that allows account holders to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrency directly from their account. The company also said it will make cryptocurrency available as a funding source for purchases at the 26 million merchants worldwide that accept PayPal.Payments provider FIS Inc. said it added pharmacy chain Walgreens …

With merchant adoption of contactless payment solutions accelerating due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Incognia, a provider of fraud-detection applications, announced an app Tuesday to detect Quick Response code fraud.  The application uses location behavioral biometrics to create a digital fingerprint for the consumer’s identity. It uses the buyer’s real-time and …

The nation’s automated clearing house network surged again in the September quarter, even with a waning of federal-assistance payments. Volume grew by double-digit percentage increases in most major categories as the network handled 6.8 billion transactions overall, up 9%, Nacha reported Tuesday. Nacha is the governing body for the network, …