For the China-based Alipay payments service, pursuing niche merchant markets in North America no longer is good enough. “When we’re looking at partners, we’re looking for ubiquity,” says Souheil Badran, president of Alipay North America. Those partners so far include First Data Corp., which in May opened its huge U.S. …

• Phillips 66 Co. moved closer to the launch of its mobile-payments service for fuel purchases with the unveiling of its mobile-commerce platform developed in conjunction with P97 Networks Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Pay. • Payment gateway Shift4 Corp. announced its cofounders, J. David Oder and Katherine Oder, are entering …

• Mobile-payments provider LevelUp said it has closed a $50 million funding round with participation by existing investor JPMorgan Chase & Co. as well as US Boston and CentroCredit Bank. LevelUp, which says its user count is nearly 1 million, is the subject of a lawsuit by competitor CardFree Inc. alleging LevelUp fraudulently …

When it comes to establishing merchant acceptance in North America, Alipay’s ambitions go well beyond niche markets. In fact, “When we’re looking at partners, we’re looking for ubiquity,” Souheil Badran, president of Alipay North America, tells Digital Transactions News in a wide-ranging interview. Those partners so far include First Data …

• Processing giant First Data Corp. and cross-border payments specialist Flywire Corp. announced a collaboration by which Flywire education and health-care clients will be able to more easily accept cross-border card payments and First Data clients will be able to more readily accept high-value international remittances. • Gro Solutions, a vendor of digital solutions …

Savvy execs look beyond payment processing for earnings growth. Text Receipts are a natural starting point. Credit card processing has long been a commodity business in the United States. Just as in other markets, large merchants have unbeatable pricing and it’s the small and medium sized businesses, or “SMBs”, who …

Shopify Inc. is often thought of as a platform for smaller e-commerce merchants, but it offers processing services for some 65,000 physical-world sellers, as well, and on Thursday it unveiled a new EMV card reader that features a Bluetooth low-energy link to mobile devices and what the company says is …

By Kevin Woodward Both QR codes and NFC have their backers and critics. But as mobile payments advance, which acceptance technology will own the future? Merchants and the payments industry alike are vying to encourage more consumers to use contactless payments as a way to displace cash, know more about …

Contactless payments may seem like the next evolution of the U.S. payments industry, but the challenges confronting that technology may be greater than those of the ongoing chip migration, industry observers suggested on Tuesday at an industry trade show. “At the moment, contactless is much more complex, more expensive,” Allen …

• Payments-automation specialist linked2pay has added a real-time merchant-onboarding capability to its Bank Centric Payments platform, allowing independent sales organizations and other resellers enrolled with a sponsor bank to register, underwrite, and board merchants for card processing electronically and immediately. • Mobile-commerce provider Sionic Mobile said it is integrating its ION Commerce …