Competitive Strategies

Members of Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime membership service are enthusiastic users of the e-retail giant’s payments service, which it makes available to other merchants. In fact, some 50% of Amazon Pay’s users belong to Prime, according to Amazon Pay vice president Patrick Gauthier, who spoke with Digital Transactions News Tuesday at …

• Fitness-band vendor Fitbit Inc. has acquired the wearable-payments assets of Coin in a deal that closed May 12 and includes relevant personnel and intellectual property. Terms were not disclosed. Coin, which was part of a wearable-payments initiative announced earlier this year by MasterCard Inc., is best-known for a device that …

The increasingly dramatic proxy fight at prepaid card issuer Green Dot Corp., a fight that could cost its founder, chairman, and chief executive Steven W. Streit his job if management loses, took an interesting turn Monday when Green Dot said it would appoint George Gresham, a director nominee from the …

After eight months of experimentation in Columbus, Ohio, Merchant Customer Exchange LLC on Monday issued a statement from chief executive Brian Mooney announcing it is putting off a national rollout of its CurrentC mobile-payments service to an unspecified date. Mooney added that the Boston-based company, formed in 2012 by many …

Payments startup Payzing Inc. is banking that a digital-currency integration with Uphold, a virtual funds and commodity platform, will lead to e-commerce success. San Francisco-based Payzing uses Uphold’s blockchain technology to offer online merchants an alternate payment method to traditional credit and debit cards. Consumers use their Uphold accounts to …

Despite a 66% increase in shipments of EMV chip cards to U.S. credit and debit card issuers in the first quarter, shares of CPI Card Group Inc. plunged as much as 43% Thursday morning after the big card manufacturer reported financial results below its expectations. CPI said large issuers and …

For all the talk about independent software vendors and value-added resellers as an alternative channel for acquirers to sign up new merchants, the ISV/VAR share of the market is actually quite small, according to research released last week by Annapolis, Md.-based First Annapolis Consulting. The research does indicate, however, that …

Pricing advantages once held by super-large acquirers—those whose merchants process more than 3 million monthly credit and debit transactions—appear to have retreated, according to the Merchant Processing Pricing Benchmark Study recently issued by The Strawhecker Group. These jumbo acquirers had, on average, the lowest amounts for their processing and authorization …

Ouch. Merchant acquirer Square Inc. reported after Thursday’s market close that payment volume grew 45% year over year in the first quarter to $10.3 billion, but the company’s stock still fell 22% on Friday. Despite the strong payments growth, investors didn’t like a number of things they saw in San …

Boosted by a 45% increase in payment volume to $10.3 billion, Square Inc.’s adjusted revenues jumped 64% in the first quarter, but the merchant processor’s net loss doubled to $96.8 million on higher expenses as the company continued to invest like a startup for future growth. In its second earnings …