Competitive Strategies

In an effort to cement its ties with restaurants, Square Inc. announced Wednesday it is adding a pick-up feature to its Caviar meal-delivery service and has acquired the OrderAhead restaurant pick-up service. Both moves capitalize on the trend time-strapped consumers buying restaurant meals for consumption elsewhere, be it at home or …

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Ever since Ant Financial Services Group let it be known in October that it is working with key payments players like VeriFone Systems Inc. and First Data Corp. to bring its Alipay mobile-payments service to North America, the industry has wondered about the Chinese company’s strategy both in the United …

In an early glimpse of how U.S. businesses are using faster payments, the governing body for the automated clearing house issued survey results last month showing that 90% of respondents at surveyed financial institutions report same-day ACH origination volume at or above what they expected. Despite that higher-than-expected volume, the …

In the battle over online bill payments, biller sites have been beating bank and third-party sites handily, but now the battle has turned into a rout. Biller sites accounted for fully 73% of online bills paid by consumers last year, up from 62% in 2010, according to a report from …

• In separate blog posts, PayPal Holdings Inc. executive vice president Bill Ready and chief executive Dan Schulman reported the company has reached 200 million total consumer, merchant, and charity accounts. They also said the PayPal’s One Touch authentication technology has signed up 50 million consumers and more than 5 million merchant accounts, …

In the February, 2017, issue of Digital Transactions, Steve Mott argues that the U.S. EMV migration was a misguided, poorly planned, and poorly executed effort. In his article, “The Great EMV Hangover,” he considers the migration to be a failure, writing, “As 2016 wound to a close, nothing short of …

In today’s 4G world, connected homes allow you to turn on lights, turn down thermostats, or activate sprinklers, all remotely. Wearables wake you up and tell you how long and how well you slept. Fingerprints, faces, even the rhythm of your heart are replacing passwords. There’s a lot happening on the connectivity …

Mastercard Inc. and Oracle Corp. announced Monday a collaboration that could dramatically expand the reach of Mastercard’s Masterpass digital-wallet technology, as well as the network’s tokenization capability. Masterpass will be embedded into Oracle’s POS systems for retail and hospitality merchants. The companies said Oracle will embed Masterpass in systems it …

• Rambus Inc. introduced its Rambus Unified Payment Platform, which it says will enable mobile-wallet users to pay with credit, points, and coupons in a single transaction. • Payments provider Harbortouch Payments LLC announced a partnership with Strategic Funding Source, a merchant cash-advance provider. • Square Inc. will pay $54.8 million to Starbucks Corp. to cancel …