Competitive Strategies

With PayPal Holdings Inc. promoting its fast-growing Venmo peer-to-peer payments service and rumors that Apple Inc. is eyeing the business, P2P transfers are starting to take center stage in the consumer-payments business. And now a new survey indicates the service is growing in appeal to consumers for a variety of …

Leading payment processor First Data Corp. late Tuesday reported modest revenue and transaction growth in 2015’s fourth quarter, as well as better pre-tax profitability and an improved balance sheet in the wake of its October initial public offering, but investors still didn’t like what they saw. The Atlanta-based company’s stock …

The prospect of ubiquitous merchant acceptance and the ability to carry just one card in lieu of several was too much of a promise, alleges a lawsuit filed last week against Coin Inc., a startup offering a universal card service. Filed on behalf of two consumers who each purchased a …

Look for more ATM placements, capital spending, and possible acquisitions by leading retail ATM network owner and operator Cardtronics Inc. in 2016. The growth plan mostly conforms to the long-term strategy the company has been following in recent years, according to comments by top Cardtronics executives late Thursday. Houston-based Cardtronics …

Vantiv Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. are, separately, creating new looks for their brands. Vantiv, which bought integrated-payments specialist Mercury Payment Systems LLC in 2014  for $1.65 billion, is renaming Mercury and Element Payment Services, an integrated-payments provider it purchased in 2013, as a single unit called Vantiv Integrated Payments. This …

In a move that recognizes the powerful role application developers play in the global payments arena, Visa Inc. on Thursday opened scores of its application programming interfaces to thousands of outsiders worldwide, including merchants, banks, and technology companies. The new program, called Visa Developer, embraces some 155 APIs and includes …

Two leading merchant acquirers, Vantiv Inc. and Heartland Payment Systems Inc., are reporting strong transaction growth in their most recent financials. Boosted in part by its first full year of owning Mercury Payment Systems, Symmes Township, Ohio-based Vantiv on Wednesday said its Merchant Services segment processed 19 billion transactions in 2015, …

It’s common for consumers who use a recurring service to designate a credit or debit card that the service provider can charge each month. With the automated clearing house, this is much less common. Dwolla Inc. says that’s because it’s too difficult and time-consuming for most businesses to set up …

A new study of smart-phone users shows awareness and usage of Apple Pay is slightly down from last spring, providing yet more evidence that the much-touted mobile-payments service from Apple Inc. hasn’t set the world on fire. On the plus side, the December survey of 1,279 consumers for First Annapolis …

The introduction of cardless ATMs, which rely on a financial institution’s mobile wallet instead of a debit card to make an ATM withdrawal, could help further the adoption of mobile wallets and mobile payments. That’s the assessment of Jerimy Saldivar at Peoples Bank, a Bellingham, Wash.-based financial institution with 24 …