Competitive Strategies

New York’s comptroller, who oversees the state’s public pension funds, last week sent letters to the four general-purpose card networks, three of the nation’s biggest banks, and First Data Corp. and Worldpay Inc. asking them to assess whether gun sales should be considered restricted high-risk purchases, Bloomberg reported. New York’s letter comes …

Elavon, the merchant-acquiring subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp, is expanding its Atlanta headquarters and adding 180 jobs over the next three years in its integrated-payments and e-commerce sectors, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported. In the first deployment of its peer-to-peer payment service outside the U.S., Square Inc. is rolling out its Cash app in the …

Mobile-wallet usage is expected to increase in 2019 as almost 2.1 billion consumers worldwide choose the payment option, predicts Juniper Research Ltd. In its “Mobile Wallets: Service Provider Analysis, Market Opportunities & Forecasts 2018-2022” report released Wednesday, United Kingdom-based Juniper notes that next year’s forecasted number of mobile-wallet users is …

Bank processors over the past several years have worked to combine cardless technology with a continuing consumer demand for cash, a trend that took on momentum on Wednesday with an announcement from Fiserv Inc. that three ATM manufacturers are now supporting the company’s 3-year-old CardFree Cash service. ATM makers Genmega, …

POS equipment maker Ingenico Group said KFC Corp., a unit of Yum! Brands Inc., migrated its U.S. payment system to Ingenico’s Telium semi-integrated POS service. Consumers now can make chip-and-sign, chip-and-PIN, magnetic-stripe, and contactless transactions at KFC locations. Online shopping-cart provider 3dcart said its upcoming version 8.1 will support Google …

Wire-transfer provider MoneyGram International Inc. and Walmart Inc. announced a new international service Tuesday dubbed Walmart2World that the companies say enables recipients to get funds in as little as 10 minutes. The long-time partners also renewed for two years the contract under which Walmart offers MoneyGram’s various money-transfer and bill-pay …

Lately, the cryptocurrency craze has raised any number of questions, but probably the most pressing one for the payments business is whether any of these hundreds of tokens can ever succeed as an actual payment device. But while fluctuating trading values plague all of the digital currencies, one stands out …

While mobile-payments growth has fallen short of expectations in the United States, worldwide mobile volume will grow at an average annual rate of 33.8% through 2023, reaching $4.57 trillion by that year, according to projections by Allied Market Research. Market drivers include consumer preference for digital and cashless payments, the firm …

NXT-ID Inc., a provider of authentication and contactless-payment technology, reported on Monday that its revenue tripled last year compared to 2016 while its adjusted earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes, and amortization swung positive. The Melbourne, Fla.-based company is best-known in the payments market for its Fit Pay Inc. unit, which …

Advent International, a private-equity firm with considerable experience in the payments space, announced Friday that it had acquired a majority stake in the big independent sales organization and payment processor Clearent LLC and merged it with FieldEdge, an independent software vendor serving home-services contractors. Advent had also bought FieldEdge. Financial …