Competitive Strategies

Gift and prepaid card services provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. reported Tuesday that it has a deal with two financial firms to be taken private for $3.5 billion. Private-equity firm Silver Lake Management L.L.C. and hedge fund P2 Capital Partners are offering $45.25 per share in cash. The offer represents …

Vantiv Inc.’s acquisition of Worldpay Group plc, which was announced in August, officially closed Tuesday, forming a company called Worldpay Inc. The combined company processes more than 40 billion transactions worth more than $1.5 trillion annually around the world. Over a 24-hour period, a swooning Bitcoin shed nearly $2,600 in …

When major technology companies started launching mobile-payments services a few years ago, many observers figured digitized and tokenized card credentials would soon replace old-fashioned plastic. But now, the chronically sluggish adoption and usage rates these mobile wallets have registered is lending new life to plastic cards. The twist is that …

Lighthouse Network, the company behind such acquiring and point-of-sale brands as Harbortouch and POSitouch, announced Monday it has purchased Shift4 Corp., a Las Vegas-based payment gateway, for an undisclosed amount. Allentown, Pa.-based Lighthouse also announced it would adopt the Shift4 name, rebranding itself as Shift4 Payments. It was only in …

Cardlytics Inc., which provides marketers with payment card purchase information as well as ACH and bill-payment data from 2,000 partner financial institutions, filed for a $75 million initial public offering. Cardlytics says that in 2016 its platform analyzed more than 18 billion online and in-store transactions across more than 94 million accounts, …

Zelle on Saturday was set to run the first spots in its initial national mass-media marketing campaign, which is centered on the Tony and Grammy Award-winning actor and rapper Daveed Diggs in an effort to appeal to what the bank-controlled person-to-person payments service calls the “mobile majority” of consumers. The …

Visa Inc.’s announcement Friday that it will make signature authentication optional for EMV contact and contactless transactions in North America starting in April might provide another boost for merchants who have yet to adopt chip-card acceptance, suggests an analyst. Signatures remain a requirement for Visa magnetic stripe-based transactions not subject to …

Visa Inc. is joining the other three card brands in making signatures optional for many of its transactions beginning in April. The card brand, which had credit card volume of $499 billion and debit volume of $388 billion in its fourth quarter ended Sept. 30, says in a blog post published …

Same-day processing for both credits and debits on the automated clearing house network finished its first full quarter on Dec. 31, and numbers released Thursday show a solid increase in volume and dollars. In particular, same-day debits, introduced Sept. 15 , are growing fast and finished the final quarter accounting for …

Processor JetPay Corp. announced its payments, payroll, and account-opening services are now available to clients of Bolts Technologies, a software provider specializing in deposit account onboarding for financial institutions. VeriFone Systems Inc. introduced its e280, a mobile point-of-sale device with a 3.5-inch color touchscreen that accepts near-field communication contactless payments, …