Competitive Strategies

As businesses in the Houston area attempt to recover following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey in late August, the payments industry is offering assistance. First Data Corp. is offering thousands of its Clover Go mobile credit and debit card readers free to business owners affected by the hurricane. The offer includes …

Driven by higher prices and more usage, the value of cryptocurrency transactions could exceed $1 trillion this year, more than 15 times their level in 2016, a British research firm estimates. Hampshire, England-based Juniper Research in a new report pegs the value of cryptocurrency transactions in 2017’s first half at $325 …

Performance Matters, which offers professional instruction for public-school educators, has agreed to use SchoolPay, a unit of My Payment Network, to process payments for professional development for teachers in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms. MoneyOnMobile Inc., a Dallas-based company with operations in India, said it processed more than 1 million domestic transfers in …

The financial-services industry can take some satisfaction that it has improved its overall compliance with the PCI data-security standard, going from 42.9% of firms in full compliance in 2015 to 59.1% in 2016, as measured in the 2017 Payment Security Report from Verizon Enterprise, the business-services unit of telecommunications carrier …

Change. It’s one of the most feared events in one’s life; personally and professionally. People are scared of the unknown, which makes them naturally resistant to change. This fear is one of the primary reasons why evolving, or changing, an organization is one of the most difficult leadership challenges most …

Total spending via contactless mobile payments in the United States will exceed $1,000 per user for the first time in 2017, reaching $1,026, according to forecasts by eMarketer. Total U.S. contactless mobile payments will hit $49.29 billion this year, up 78.1% from 2016, the firm projects. Fiserv Inc. completed its $89-million, cash acquisition …

Google plans soon to give merchants access to the vast trove of credit card credentials it has in its databases to speed customer checkout for mobile and online payments. The search-engine giant, however, is not putting itself in competition with payment card networks, a Google executive said this week. The …

Payments provider NXT-ID Inc. announced its FitPay Inc. subsidiary is providing the payments technology for the vivoactive 3, a new smart watch from Garmin International Inc. Dubbed Garmin Pay, the service supports contactless payments made with Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. credit and debit cards from major issuing banks. Earlier this week, Fitbit Inc. introduced Fitbit Pay. In …

Blackhawk Network Inc., a major player in merchant-branded prepaid cards, just gained an even bigger foothold in that market with its $175-million, all-cash acquisition of CashStar Inc., a 10-year-old firm specializing in digital gift cards. Announced Wednesday morning the dealbrings to Pleasanton, Calif.-based Blackhawk a platform enabling mrchants to market …

There wasn’t a Regular Joe in the room, but that didn’t stop a panel of payments professionals Tuesday from probing the consumer psyche to discern why mobile wallets aren’t more popular. As a percentage of point-of-sale transactions, most experts agree that the major general-purpose mobile wallets—Apple Pay, Android Pay, and …