Competitive Strategies

Online marketplace eBay Inc. will add business-to-business gift cards from Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. to its roster of products, Blackhawk announced Wednesday. The expansion—Blackhawk already provides other gift card services to eBay—will help the marketplace with its B2B sales, Blackhawk says. Now, businesses can order eBay gift cards to reward …

For the last four years, Square Cash has been a popular person-to-person payment app, but now Square Inc. is adding another function: buying and selling Bitcoin. The San Francisco payments company is testing the new feature with an undisclosed number of Square Cash users, according to the company and users’ …

Unless there is a potential fraud issue or customer dispute, very few of the trillions of transactions that cross U.S. electronic payment networks annually attract any attention. But the first transaction on The Clearing House’s new real-time payments system was so different that BNY Mellon, the bank originator, invoked the …

Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since 2011, is resigning, according to a report on TheHill.com, a political news site. The CFPB’s only director since it was created, Cordray expects to leave the agency by the end of the month, the site said. Fashion retailer Forever 21 Inc. said it …

The Clearing House’s much-anticipated real-time payments system, dubbed RTP, went live late Monday afternoon, ushering in a new era of faster electronic payments in the United States. The transaction between The Bank of New York Mellon Corp.’s BNY Mellon subsidiary and U.S. Bancorp’s U.S. Bank was completed at 4:59:40 p.m. …

Chatbots, quick-response codes, and so-called invisible payments will spur digital-coupon redemption volume to $91 billion worldwide by 2022, forecasts Juniper Research Ltd. These three technologies will propel redemption as consumers increasingly become accustomed to them, says the United Kingdom-based research firm. For example, chatbots, a form of machine learning that …

Observers who wondered not long ago whether Bitcoin was too valuable to be a payment method may now be wondering whether it’s too volatile. The cryptocurrency has soared all year, reaching a peak near $7,800 only six days ago, but then it crashed hard, shedding about $2,000 in value by …

ShopKeep, a provider of tablet-based point-of-sale equipment and services, announced an integration with online-information management service Yext Inc. The integration will allow ShopKeep clients to check and modify information about their businesses across platforms like Google, Apple, Facebook, Bing, and Yahoo. Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group released the Moby/8500 mobile …

Visa Inc. announced Monday that it has created a business unit dedicated to transit payments. The new unit debuts as public transportation agencies worldwide move away from cash and proprietary magnetic-stripe fare cards and begin accepting mobile wallets and contactless general-purpose credit and debit cards. Dubbed Visa Global Transit Solutions, …

PayPal Holdings Inc.’s planned integration of its TIO Networks bill-pay operation hit a major snag late Friday when PayPal said it had shut down TIO’s system after the discovery of a security issue. Neither PayPal nor TIO released details about the issue. In a statement, PayPal said it involves “security …