Competitive Strategies

When it comes to faster payments, merchants don’t want to be left out, and that’s creating a big opportunity for payments processors and other merchant acquirers.  Indeed, as the payments industry shifts toward real-time and near-real-time money movement, processors can cash in on the value of getting good funds into …

Online marketplace Shopify Inc. says it will add Venmo as a payment option, MarketWatch reported. PayPal Holdings Inc., Venmo’s parent, has been promoting a Pay With Venmo service to encourage more users of Venmo, known chiefly as a peer-to-peer payment app, to rely on the service for online purchases. The …

Discover Financial Services’s lending operations dwarf its payments business, but payments nonetheless are an important component of the company’s growth strategy, new chief executive Roger C. Hochschild said Thursday. Hochschild, who joined Discover in 1998 and served as its president and chief operating officer for 14 years, this month succeeded …

Visa Inc. has been talking up contactless payments lately, though its executives and spokespersons usually dole out percentages rather than hard numbers to describe what is still a minuscule market in terms of card numbers and transaction volume. But chief executive Alfred F. Kelly gave an eyebrow-raising statistic Wednesday regarding …

Merchants should expect even more consumers to shop online this holiday shopping season. They also should expect even more fraud attempts. New research from Riskified, an Israel-based data-security provider, and cybersecurity firm IntSights finds that the number of false retailer Web sites meant to get consumers to give up their …

If the Federal Reserve decides to compete in the developing market for real-time payments, it will face considerable obstacles, one of which has to do with whether such competition is really needed, according to an official with The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC. The Clearing House, which is recruiting financial …

Fleet-fueling and corporate-payments provider WEX Inc. reported this week that it has a deal to acquire Noventis Inc., a bill-payment network and virtual card specialist. South Portland, Maine-based WEX said in a news release that it already has a “longstanding relationship” with Noventis as a supplier of virtual cards for …

Processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) said its Merchant Solutions unit processed 1.53 billion point-of-sale transactions in the third quarter, a 22% increase from 1.26 billion a year earlier. Sales volume rose 30% to $40.9 billion. The Consumer Solutions segment, which includes the Netspend prepaid card operation, posted gross dollar …

The Zelle person-to-person payment service continued to gain traction in the third quarter. Zelle Network reported Tuesday that it processed $32 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30 on 116 million transactions. The latest figures represent a year-over-year growth rate of 67% in payment value and 83% in transactions. …

With a major new—and somewhat controversial—e-commerce standard now entering a 45-day comment phase, the payments industry is likely to have at least some “commercial applications” ready by early spring, the top executive in charge of Visa Inc.’s implementation tells Digital Transactions News. The specification, known as Secure Remote Commerce, has …