Competitive Strategies

Now that financial institutions have launched a digital peer-to-peer payment service called Zelle to battle popular nonbank services like Venmo, the rival platforms are likely to divide up a rapidly growing market but will also face pressure to find ways to charge for the service. While overall U.S. P2P dollar …

Square Inc. opened a store in New York City on Thursday to showcase its products and highlight products from some of its merchants, marking the digital-payments company’s first effort at running its own brick-and-mortar shop. Dubbed the Square Showroom, the lower Manhattan location has displays of various Square point-of-sale products …

The pending sale by American Express Co. of its Serve technology platform to prepaid card program manager InComm moves AmEx more toward the model used by most other general-purpose prepaid card issuers and still keeps the upscale AmEx brand involved in a business mostly oriented toward moderate- and lower-income consumers, …

With the blessing of the Federal Trade Commission and Whole Foods Market Inc. shareholders, Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday cleared the last significant hurdles in the way of its $13.7 billion deal to acquire the Austin, Texas-based chain of some 470 grocery stores. The deal, which was announced in June and …

So-called native automated clearing house payments that originate electronically rather than by conversion of a paper check continued their robust growth in the second quarter while same-day ACH transaction volume hit $16.6 billion, reports ACH governing body NACHA—The Electronic Payments Association.  In total, the ACH network transferred 5.35 billion payments, …

Bridg Inc., a marketing software company for the restaurant industry, said Thursday that it lined up $11 million in series B funding from Visa Inc. and private-equity firms Morpheus Ventures, NextEquity Partners, and March Capital. Specific investment amounts made by each company were not disclosed. Los Angeles-based Bridg uses artificial …

American Express Co. says it disagrees with an opinion from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that differences in card products it offered in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Pacific Territories from cards it offered in the United States amounted to discrimination. AmEx says it resolved the differences in 2013 after …

QualPay, a provider of cloud-based, integrated-payments solutions, launched a developer portal allowing integrators to evaluate and deploy payment services. Person-to-person payments by users of services offered by community banks and credit unions average $450, compared to $25 for users of Venmo, a popular third-party app, according to data from Malauzai Software, …

USA Technologies Inc., a provider of payment services for vending machines and other unattended merchant locations, said Tuesday the number of connections in its ePort network grew 32% year-over-year to 568,000 as of June 30, and transaction volume nearly as much. The Malvern, Pa.-based firm also reported net income of …

It’s what some may consider a bold forecast for contactless payments in the United States, but Juniper Research is predicting that, by 2022, 34% of electronic payments will be contactless, up from less than 2% in 2017. United Kingdom-based Juniper released its forecast Monday in a report called “POS and …