Competitive Strategies

E-commerce has expanded at a fast clip in recent years, in part thanks to habits formed during the pandemic, and with that growth has come new techniques to simplify buying and selling for both experienced and new users. The latest development emerged Thursday with an announcement by Caseproof LLC that …

Synchrony Financial said it will acquire the point-of-sale financing business of Ally Financial Inc. The portfolio includes $2.2 billion in loan receivables and includes relationships with nearly 2,500 merchant locations and more than 450,000 active borrowers in home improvement services and health care. Terms were not disclosed. Alchemy Pay, whose gateway …

Lightspeed Commerce Inc. has partnered with golf-course management company GreatLIFE Golf & Fitness to provide point-of-sale technology for GreatLIFE’s GolfBack direct-booking engine. Lightspeed will begin deploying its POS technology at 14 golf courses operated by GreatLIFE in the Kansas City, Mo.-area, with plans to expand the technology to additional GreatLIFE-operated …

Sound Payments issued a slate of updates for its point-of-sale system, including a way for retailers to categorize returns. Jacksonville, Fla.-based Sound Payments says the new return-categories feature enables merchants to catalog returns by size, reason for return, defective, and other custom variables. It also has a reporting component for …

UnionPay, an international payment card network based in China, said it is now accepted in 183 countries and regions, with issuance outside the Chinese mainland exceeding 230 million cards in 81 countries. Issuance outside Mainland China commenced in January 2004. Consumer-finance and card issuer Synchrony said it is testing a browser extension …

FedNow, the real-time payments network operated by the Federal Reserve, announced late Tuesday it has 400 financial institutions participating as senders or receivers after six months of operation. The much-anticipated Fed service launched last July with 35 participating financial institutions. Participating institutions range in size from less than $500 million …

Apple Inc. will let developers enable purchases outside of its App Store, marking a change that previously prohibited such action. The move comes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court this week declining to hear appeals from either Apple or Epic Games in their court saga. Epic sued Apple …

Giant payment processor Fiserv Inc. wants to take on another aspect of the business with its application for a special bank charter in Georgia. The charter for a merchant-acquirer limited purpose bank, if approved, would enable Brookfield, Wis.-based Fiserv to interact with card networks directly instead of operating through a …

Payments-platform provider Payroc LLC has launched PayByCloud, low-code, semi-integrated technology for independent software vendors that establishes a cloud-based connection between Payroc’s application hosted on a payment device and the Payroc gateway.  PayByCloud is intended to eliminate the friction of connecting software to payment devices in the cloud, without the need …

Nuvei Corp. said it has agreed to process e-commerce transactions for Galeries Lafayette UAE, a unit of French Department Stores LLC. Linnworks, an e-commerce inventory and order-management software provider, said it is working with Lightspeed Commerce Inc. to enable Linnworks clients to connect to Lightspeed Retail. Fintech Varo Bank N.A. announced it is offering a …