Competitive Strategies

After slipping the previous two years, spending at independent shops and restaurants jumped 38% to an estimated $17.8 billion on Small Business Saturday, American Express Co. and the National Federation of Independent Business trade group reported Monday. AmEx founded the Saturday-after-Thanksgiving promotion in 2010 to highlight locally owned businesses in …

PayPal Holdings Inc. has been trying to make money off of its highly popular but free peer-to-peer payments service, Venmo, but over the weekend a report emerged indicating a surge in fraud could have complicated that effort. Venmo sustained a transaction loss rate of 0.40% in March, up from 0.25% …

Worldpay Inc. and Paysafe Group announced a partnership to establish a payments platform for the U.S. online-gaming and sports-betting sector. The U.S. Secret Service lit up Operation Deep Impact last week in a nationwide initiative to find and remove credit and debit card skimming devices on fuel pumps. Following a …

Payments experts may think mobile technology is crucial for banks and other financial-service providers, but it turns out a significant chunk of financial institutions don’t agree. Fourteen percent of respondents in a survey this summer of banks and credit unions said they not only don’t offer mobile payments and other …

Processor Pineapple Payments said it is offering merchant services on the platform of OnPay Solutions, a provider of accounts-payable and accounts-receivable automation services for businesses. First Data Corp. launched its Clover Mini and Clover Flex smart point-of-sale terminals in Argentina. Elo, a bank-owned payment network in Brazil, agreed to work with …

Rebuffed earlier this month, a hedge fund on Tuesday urged remote deposit capture and identity-verification software provider Mitek Systems Inc. to reconsider its rejection of a buyout offer and begin negotiations. In a letter to Mitek’s board of directors, New York City-based Elliott Management Corp. accuses the board of “old-fashioned …

Payments companies and retailers have a sobering forecast to ponder for online fraud. By 2023, global online fraud losses from e-commerce, airline ticketing, money transfer, and banking services will grow from $22 billion projected in 2018 to $48 billion, says Juniper Research in a new report. Thanks to the proliferation …

As Chinese tourists pour into the United States and Canada, merchants are preparing for them by outfitting their checkouts to accept WeChat Pay and Alipay, the two leading Chinese mobile-payments services. The latest is 7-Eleven Inc., which said Tuesday it is enabling acceptance of the two wallets at 35 stores …

The ongoing selloff of technology stocks is pulling down payments-industry shares despite no major negative earnings or other recent news from payment companies. Shares of 41 of 45 payments-related companies tracked by Digital Transactions News fell Monday. Downward pressure moderated Tuesday morning but still continued. Among the worst hit Monday …

U.S. consumers have made the credit card their favorite online and face-to-face spending method, with 31.5% using it online and 40% choosing it for in-store transactions last year, according to the Worldpay Global Payments Report 2018. Released late last week, the report also found that debit cards and digital wallets, …