It’s been the winter of chest-thumping for e-commerce payments providers. Amsterdam-based Adyen, which is targeting the U.S. market from its San Francisco office, on Wednesday announced that its worldwide transaction volume jumped 80% last year to hit $90 billion from 2015’s $50 billion. On Tuesday, the secretive Amazon.com Inc. disclosed …

PayPal and other non-banks got out of the gate fast to build burgeoning person-to-person payments empires. Is Zelle the banks’ savior? In a few months, the battle between banks and non-banks for the lion’s share of the exploding person-to-person payments market will escalate to a new level. That’s when Zelle, …

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) reported that it is talking with the Federal Trade Commission to settle the FTC’s November lawsuit accusing TSYS’s NetSpend prepaid card unit of deceptively marketing reloadable prepaid cards. TSYS took a $13 million charge in the fourth quarter in connection with the settlement talks. • Newtek …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group is among many payments companies making announcements Monday at the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show in New York City. France-based Ingenico says its ePayments division and its research arm Ingenico Labs now offer payment-enabled messaging bots for e-commerce merchants. Bots are an artificial intelligence …

• Independent sales organization Applied Merchant Systems announced it has increased its liquidity following  an expansion of its credit line with Goldman Sachs Specialty Lending Group and Business Development Corporation of America. In conjunction, Blue Square Resolutions, also an ISO, became a shareholder in the company. • Miami-based NovoPayments, which processes payments throughout …

It’s been said for years, but 2017 finally could be the year for mobile payments, according to Chetan Sharma, a prominent consultant in the mobile-technology space. “Fueled by demonetization in India and the rise of viable mobile-payment solutions worldwide, we expect mobile payments to enter the consumer consciousness in a …

Acquirers are starting to leverage the power of massive—and diverse—pools of information. The challenge lies in unlocking big data’s full potential. Big data has been a hot topic for years as companies look for innovative ways to become more competitive, boost customer retention, and raise their bottom line. Now merchant …

They sell products, answer questions, and take payments in a process called conversational commerce. Just how much potential do chatbots really have? It’s been one of those days. You could use a drink. But you’re traveling on business, and you’re not sure where the local bars are. And you’re not …

Chatbot developer Kasisto Inc. has agreed to provide a so-called smartbot for Varo Money Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of a mobile-only banking app. Both the app and the bot are in beta testing and expected to launch early next year. The new bot, called Val, is based on conversational …

An offshoot of artificial-intelligence research, chatbots emerged in 2016 as a popular technology for reaching and serving consumers for banking, payments, and shopping. Facebook’s Messenger app, which began supporting the bits of code this spring, was by September already crawling with 30,000 bots holding conversations with consumers to fulfill simple …