Competitive Strategies

Gas stations caught a lucky break a year ago when Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. postponed their planned October 2017 EMV liability shifts for unattended fuel pumps for three years. Almost no convenience store or stand-alone gas station chain would have been ready by then, retail petroleum executives say, and …

7-Eleven Inc. announced it is testing online ordering for delivery or pickup on its new 7-ElevenNOW mobile app at 10 downtown and uptown stores in Dallas. The convenience-store chain expects to begin rolling out the app to other stores in 2018. Payments provider Clearent LLC said it received validation of …

VeriFone Systems Inc. has finally shed its underperforming taxi business, but it still faces a North American market hampered by a three-year delay in an EMV deadline for U.S. petroleum marketers. The San Jose, Calif.-based point-of-sale company sold the taxi unit on Tuesday for $30 million. VeriFone, which will retain …

The seemingly unending growth in online shopping is doing more than closing physical stores. The point of sale in the stores that remain is changing, and along with it, payments providers, says Javelin Strategy & Research in its “2017-2021 Retail Point of Sale Payment Forecast.” As consumers continue to increase …

Mastercard Inc. launched Assemble, a prepaid service aimed at Millennials that features a digital prepaid account, a mobile app, and a physical or digital card. The service also includes budgeting capability and peer-to-peer payments through Mastercard Send. The company says it plans to extend versions of Assemble to other markets, …

American Express Co. on Monday became the third of the four major U.S. card brands to announce it will cease requiring signatures for transactions made with its cards at the point of sale beginning in April 2018. AmEx says its rule change applies to all point-of-sale purchase transactions globally, a …

The first Bitcoin futures contracts began trading at 6 p.m. Eastern Time Sunday and almost right away the volume of activity crashed a Web site operated by the exchange, Cboe Global Markets Inc. After an initial run up, Bitcoin was trading around $16,500 by 10 a.m. Monday. A rival exchange, …

The reasons why consumers hate checks are numerous: waiting for a check to arrive in the mail, finding an institution to deposit it, waiting another three to five days for funds to clear, then fearing it might bounce. Nearly everyone would agree that it’s an antiquated process filled with stress …

Bitcoin’s heady rise this year has pleased investors and drawn the attention of derivatives exchanges and other institutional players, but it may also have obscured a development going on behind the scenes to solve one of the digital currency’s biggest drawbacks: its weakness as a payment method. Bitcoin, which started …

Consumer revolving credit jumped 9.9% on an annualized basis in October, seasonally adjusted preliminary data from the Federal Reserve show. Revolving credit outstandings, most of which are credit card debt, hit $1.01 trillion, up 5.9% from $955.3 billion in October 2016. PayCargo LLC, an online-payment platform that allows shippers and carriers to …