Competitive Strategies

The Aldi Inc. supermarket chain, which only last year began accepting credit cards, said in a press release on Thursday it now “accepts all forms of contactless payment,” including Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay and Alphabet Inc.’s Android Pay mobile wallets. The Batavia, Ill.-based company has already activated contactless payments chainwide, …

Risk-management firm ThreatMetrix Inc. said its ThreatMetrix ID product, announced this week, uses unique, anonymized customer data to help businesses make decisions about trust and identity. The product, hailed as the company’s flagship, incorporates four central capabilities. One is the unique, anonymous data it has on 1.4 billion users in …

Some 48% of surveyed U.S. consumers don’t use Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, Venmo, or Bitcoin and 46% say not enough places accept these payment methods, according to invoicing and payments firm Viewpost, which canvassed 1,000 people. Mobile-payments provider LevelUp announced a link to delivery.com, which serves more than 12,000 restaurants. The connection …

A large portion of Apple Inc.’s customers spurn facial biometrics, a key security element in Apple’s new iPhone X, according to new research. Survey results from United Kingdom-based Juniper Research say that more than 40% of users of Apple’s mobile devices in the U.S. consider themselves unlikely to use facial …

For decades, debit cards have been reliable revenue generators and relationship builders for financial institutions of all sizes. But now that bulwark for banks is under threat from multiple alternatives, putting financial-services executives on the defensive and forcing them to rethink their card strategies, argues a new paper out this …

North American Bancard said it will offer its PayAnywhere 2-in-1 Bluetooth Credit Card Reader free to new PayAnywhere merchants. Payments encryption company Bluefin Payment Systems said its services are available to users of NeuLion, software used by college-ticketing organizations. POSDATA Group Inc. said its Louisville, Ky.-based facility has been point-to-point key injection-certified by the …

Years ago, when banks wanted to sign up more merchants for credit card acceptance, they turned to non-bank third parties to sell the service. Now, these same third parties are starting to sell Bitcoin acceptance along with credit and debit cards. Aliant Payment Systems Inc., a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based independent …

Credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc., which disclosed a huge data breach earlier this month, also sustained an apparently separate data breach in March, according to Bloomberg News. Few details about that breach are publicly known. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice reportedly has opened a criminal investigation into the sale of Equifax …

Prepaid cards are still popular with Americans, but not quite as popular as in some recent years, according to new findings from Mercator Advisory Group Inc. A Mercator online survey of 3,011 U.S. adults in June found that 56% of respondents had purchased a prepaid card in the preceding 12 …

Showing resilience after recent actions that pummeled its value, Bitcoin shot up from the depths early Monday and was trading above $4,000 again. As of 10:30 Eastern Time, its price stood at $4,056, after plunging as low as $2,981 in recent days on some exchanges, according to Coindesk, which tracks …