Competitive Strategies

PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo peer-to-peer payment service has been a fabulously popular product among users, but from PayPal’s point of view it has one big problem: It’s free. Since users don’t pay for the service, PayPal has to seek Venmo revenue elsewhere. Now, with a test about to start for …

Patents usually get the most attention when a person or company files for one, but the one held by Amazon.com Inc. for single-click buying that is set to expire Tuesday is generating plenty of buzz about how much, if at all, e-commerce will change when it’s gone. Granted by the …

Q2 Holdings Inc., a provider of digital-banking solutions, launched CardSwap, an application that allows consumers to automatically switch credit or debit card information across their network of subscription and retail merchants. The first client to adopt the service is Chime, which provides branchless bank accounts. Because of Hurricane Irma, the PCI Security …

VeriFone Systems Inc. is getting closer to a sale of its payments service for taxis, the company announced Thursday during its third-quarter earnings call. Announced in June, the divestiture of the taxi business, which VeriFone started 12 years ago, is in an active process, Paul Galant, chief executive, told analysts …

Bank-owned Early Warning Services LLC said its new Zelle person-to-person payment service processed 100 million transactions in 2017’s first half for payments totaling $33.6 billion. More than 50,000 consumers are enrolling daily in a network that could connect 86 million consumers through the mobile-banking apps of participating banks and credit unions, Early Warning …

Square Inc. will apply for a Utah industrial bank charter today, a move that will extend the merchant processor’s move into lending and one which could draw the opposition of banks. The bank will be capitalized with $56 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. The financial operation will be …

Francisco Partners, a private-equity fund, has made an investment in Network Merchants Inc., a provider of payments technology and gateways to merchants and independent sales organizations. The unspecified investment is said to be “substantial.” Consequent to the deal, existing investor Bregal Sagemount will exit, and existing investor Great Hill Partners will …

The number of EMV chip card-accepting U.S. merchant locations reached 2.3 million in June, up from 2.02 million in March and an increase of 77% from 1.3 million in June 2016, according to new figures from Visa Inc. Visa says in its latest EMV report that half of U.S. storefronts now …

Marketers of integrated, cloud-based point-of-sale systems take note. It’s not enough to have full-featured service replete with multiple functions. It also takes a sales approach that is responsive and knowledgeable. That may sound like common-sense idea, but it’s one that has been vetted by The Strawhecker Group in its “The …

The Federal Reserve issued a paper outlining “refreshed strategies and nine new tactics” for improving the U.S. payment system; the paper is a follow-up to the Fed’s strategic vision for payments issued in January 2015 and comes in the wake of the July report from the Fed’s Faster Payments Task Force. The Federal Trade …