Competitive Strategies

  Merchant Warehouse Inc. has bought gift and loyalty provider Opticard and has plans to offer its services as part of bundled transaction services to merchants. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Opticard, which will continue to operate independently, sells gift and loyalty card services to small businesses. Merchants can use Opticard programs to …

  Patience is not an online virtue for consumers, and, it appears, for merchants waiting for online approval of their payment-processing account applications. At least that’s the assessment of Tom Dailey, chief executive of 2Checkout, a Columbus, Ohio-based e-commerce payment-services company, which announced this week it has revised its underwriting …

Cachet Financial Solutions Inc.’s acquisition of DeviceFidelity’s Moneto prepaid mobile platform will help open new markets for the remote-deposit capture company. n Remote-deposit capture is Cachet’s core business, Larry Blaney, executive vice president of sales, tells Digital Transactions News. But in the past two years client demand for services beyond …

Might decoupled debit rise again? It very well could, according to some payments experts, and the light on the hill is the decoupled debit card issued by the battered and bruised discount retailer Target Corp. For nearly three months, Target has weathered a storm of bad publicity after confirming a …

NCR Corp.’s announcement this week that it has updated its iPad-based point-of-sale system, which it sells as NCR Silver, to support loyalty programs shone a spotlight on one of the few tablet POS products that comes from a major corporation in a market that has attracted a raft of startups. …

  PowaTag is a mobile commerce app that hopes to make it easier for consumers to buy with their smart phones. Launched this week, PowaTag identifies products using a smart phone’s camera and microphone to detect special cues embedded in print displays, television commercials or online using the PowaTag watermark. …

By John Stewart Nearly a year after its launch, a service at U.S. Bank that lets customers enter biller details and pay bills by snapping photos of the bills with a smart phone is helping the banking giant make big gains with mobile users, a critical demographic group, a U.S. …

  Consumers carrying around the next-generation Samsung Galaxy S5 smart phone will be able to use PayPal with a tap on the device’s biometric sensor. The smart phone, scheduled for release in April, will have a fingerprint sensor that enables consumers to use their online PayPal accounts to pay for …

  MasterCard Inc.’s purchase Monday of C-Sam Inc., a mobile wallet technology company, boosts the card brand’s ability to provide mobile wallet services via a variety of payment methods, suggests a payment analyst. MasterCard paid an undisclosed amount for the Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based C-Sam, which began offering a mobile wallet …

  Card issuer and bank Capital One Financial Corp. has bought into the clearXchange person-to-person payment company, becoming the fourth owner. Founded in 2011, clearXchange was started by Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., with the idea of leveraging a consumer’s existing relationship …