Frustration with payments runs high among full-service restaurant operators, so much so that only 20% expressed no frustrations in a new TouchBistro Inc. report released Monday. The other 80% had some issue with their payments services, with many of them, 21%, citing a lack of transparency on pricing. That was …

A recent Forbes article attempted to refute many of the conclusions of a prior Wall Street Journal article that had illustrated how the card schemes (Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc.) have dramatically increased their fees in recent years. In response, the Forbes article challenged the Journal article by completely changing …

Physical gift cards may want to look over their shoulders, so to speak. Digital gift cards are gaining ground, especially among younger consumers, finds new research from Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc., a Pleasanton, Calif.-based gift card specialist. Chief among the results is that 41% of Generation Z consumers, generally those …

Checkbook, a provider of digital-check technology, introduced Instant Pay, a service that lets businesses push funds into consumer and corporate bank accounts using Visa Direct, Visa Inc.’s push-payments network. Checkbook’s founder is PJ Gupta, former chief network architect at Visa. First American Payment Systems LP said it now offers Idealpos’s …

Convenience stores saw their payment card acceptance costs rise nearly 10% in 2018 even though sales increased only 9%, according to data reported Wednesday by the trade association NACS. NACS, formerly known as the National Association of Convenience stores, says credit and debit card fees paid by its members rose …

Payment complexity, combined with a scarcity of engineering talent, makes a new functionality layer all the more urgent for merchants’ payment flows. “Orchestration” refers to software platforms and services that automate … business processes to help streamline and simplify operations management. By automating the configuration, management, and interoperability of disparate …

Lyft’s efforts to lower its costs may be emblematic of a broader initiative among so-called gig-economy firms to tame nettlesome factors like card-acceptance costs. It’s every merchant’s dream to chop card-acceptance costs to the bone. Historically, some sellers, especially those with very large credit and debit card payment volumes, purportedly …

Amazon’s tech-laden Go stores are disrupting in-store checkout. But as other merchants look to follow suit, it’s becoming clear there are lots of ways to get the checkout to check out. Consumers so loathe waiting in line at checkout  that half of all shoppers avoid entering stores with long lines, …

Neither a borrower nor a lender be, counseled Shakespeare’s Polonius. He never met today’s raft of tech-based creditors serving merchants eager to pump out sales. Stores have been offering credit to customers for at least a century. But the latest twist is to offer credit while the customer is at …

This one wasn’t hard to predict. Observers said Fiserv Inc.’s $22 billion bid for mega-processor First Data Corp. in January would trigger a wave of mergers in the payments industry—and sure enough, along came Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) on March 18 with a $43-billion cash-and-stock deal to acquire …