Competitive Strategies

Prepaid payments specialist InComm Inc. announced a big step in the Canadian market this week with a deal to expand its services this summer to some 704 grocery stores in Ontario and Quebec using the Metro banner or affiliated brands owned by Metro Inc. InComm says it will offer Metro …

Movie theater chain Cinemark Holdings Inc. announced it is encouraging consumers to use contactless payments when it reopens its locations beginning Friday.Curb, a mobile platform for taxi-ride hailing and payments, said the city of Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection is the first client for a new service aimed at …

There’s been a lot of buzz around recent reports—notably one in The New York Times—that Square has been withholding money from merchants. Apparently, with little to no warning, the company has been holding back up to 30% of merchant sales in some cases. The merchants affected, obviously, aren’t pleased. With …

A program launched last year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to let holders of electronic benefit transfer cards spend their benefits online has quickly expanded to 42 states and the District of Columbia, up from just seven states as recently as March, according to Fiserv Inc., which is working …

Kallpod LLC announced its Kontactless Quick Response code-based payment service is now available at select Hyatt, Courtyard Marriott, and Hilton locations. Consumers can place orders for food, beverages, and merchandise to be delivered where the user is sitting. They scan a QR code at a table or seat, which opens a …

Standard Cognition Corp., a San Francisco-based provider of autonomous checkout systems based on artificial intelligence, expects to have the first of Alimentation Couche-Tard’s Circle K convenience stores retrofitted and up and running in early 2021, with potentially dozens more to follow. The first store to adopt the technology will be in …

The Covid-19 pandemic in July fueled a sharp rise in e-commerce but also in fraud, according to the latest figures from ACI Worldwide Inc.  Global e-commerce transactions rose 19% in July over the same period a year earlier. Fraudulent transactions by value rose 4.4%, up from a 3.7% increase in …

Card-brand giant Visa Inc. is joining a payment-information exchange test operated by Nacha, the network operator for the automated clearing house system. Dubbed Phixius, the exchange could expedite the sharing of payment information between payees and payers and can allow for multiple payment types, including ACH, wire, card, and others. …

Payments-industry veterans Con Coughlin and Mackenzie Walsh have formed CardSmart.io, aimed at providing services including portfolio acquisition and merchant funding while working with independent software vendors, independent sales organizations, agents, and resellers.Houston-based P97 Networks Inc. announced it has been chosen by ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte Ltd. to enable mobile payments at Mobil-branded stations …

With the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating restaurants’ transition to digital payment technology, processors Shift4 Payments Inc. and SpotOn Transact Inc. have beefed up their platforms through deals to add third-party applications.  Allentown, Pa.-based Shift4 has agreed to integrate San Francisco-based Uber Technologies Inc.’s Uber Eats delivery app to its point-of-sale platform. …