Marketing

An airline trade group has teamed up with Germany’s Deutsche Bank to develop a payment system that would bypass the credit card networks, potentially saving users billions in interchange. The proposal comes from the International Air Transport Association, which says it has 280 members representing 83% of air traffic. The …

Square Inc. reported a strong first quarter late Wednesday, but you wouldn’t know it on Wall Street, where its shares were trading down slightly Thursday morning at just over $47. It closed at $48.70 Wednesday. Despite double-digit increases year-over-year in gross payment volume and net and adjusted revenue, the San …

Boosted by higher cardholder spending, American Express Co.’s discount revenue grew 9% in the first quarter despite a year-over-year decline in its average worldwide discount rate. AmEx reported late Wednesday that discount revenue hit $5.89 billion compared with $5.39 billion a year earlier. Discount revenue is by far AmEx’s largest …

What impact can fraud-prevention services have on merchant retention? Apparently, quite a bit, finds the “State of Payment Processing & Fraud: 2018 Report” from Kount Inc. Kount, a Boise, Idaho-based risk-management technology provider, found that 75% of approximately 150 payment-processor respondents say offering fraud-control tools improved merchant retention. The high …

American Express Co. disclosed Monday that it will end its multi-merchant Plenti rewards program on July 10. AmEx announced the closure through a tweet on the Plenti Twitter feed and on Plenti’s Web site. “While Plenti has grown in scale since its launch, a number of factors, including shifting priorities …

E-commerce platform 3dcart said its integration with payments provider PayJunction now includes automated clearing house transaction processing, remote signature capture, and tokenized cards on file services. In a bid to help merchants serve Japanese tourists, point-of-sale vendor Equinox Payments has added contactless support for JCB cards to its Apollo, L5000, …

Creating statements optimized for mobile devices is the biggest area of development for new digital payment options from billers, according to recent research done for payment technology provider ACI Worldwide Inc. The study by London-based technology researcher Ovum in December and January gathered responses from 1,032 executives in 10 countries …

In the increasingly competitive market for tabletop point-of-sale terminals, providers are looking for some magic. One of them, Redwood City, Calif.-based E la Carte, said this week it is changing its name to Presto, which means “fast” in Italian, as the company points out, but also adds that the word …

Wire-transfer provider MoneyGram International Inc. and Walmart Inc. announced a new international service Tuesday dubbed Walmart2World that the companies say enables recipients to get funds in as little as 10 minutes. The long-time partners also renewed for two years the contract under which Walmart offers MoneyGram’s various money-transfer and bill-pay …

With the EMV conversion mostly behind it, the United States is ripe for another big change at the point of sale—adoption of tap-and-go payments, says Visa Inc. With 96% of its payment volume now chip-based, “the next thing we’re focusing on is contactless,” Stephanie Ericksen, the card network’s vice president …