The Covid-19 pandemic has helped fuel consumer adoption of mobile-banking apps by 67% of retail bank customers in the United States, up seven percentage points from 2020. And now no significant drop in consumer usage of these apps is expected as Covid-19 restrictions ease, says the J.D. Power 2021 U.S. Banking …

Heeding years-long requests from merchants for a solution to simplify sales-tax compliance, Stripe Inc. on Thursday introduced Stripe Tax, an application that allows merchants to automatically calculate and collect sales tax, value-added tax (VAT), and goods-and-services tax (GST) in the United States and more than 30 other countries. Spurring the need …

Soon, there might be just two states that prohibit credit card surcharging with the passage Tuesday of a bill in Colorado that would permit the pricing strategy. The bill, SB21-091, passed both the Colorado House and Senate and now moves to Governor Jared Polis’s desk. He has 30 days to …

Consumer spending has now been recovering for a full year from the impact of Covid-19, according to a report released on Wednesday by Visa Inc. The card network’s U.S. Spending Momentum Index, which it began releasing publicly last month, registered a reading of 123.3 for May. That number indicates 59% …

The trend toward providing merchants technology that unites their digital and physical payments acceptance and allows them to manage their operations from a single platform got another boost Tuesday with Israel-based Wix.com Inc.’s introduction of Wix POS. The solution allows merchants to accept in-store and online payments, including contactless and chip …

As part of its strategy to create an all-encompassing platform for merchants and their suppliers, Lightspeed POS Inc. on Monday announced the acquisition of two companies: Ecwid Inc., a consumer e-commerce platform, and NuOrder Inc., an e-commerce platform for suppliers, for a combined $925 million in cash and equity in …

From a merchant perspective, one of the most harmful features of today’s card networks is default pricing. One merchant advocate succinctly described the anti-competitive impact of default pricing, stating, “with default pricing, banks have no incentive to compete for merchants’ business.”  Today, individual merchants are forced to face off against …

In an effort to stymie card-not-present fraud, which has been on the rise during the Covid-19 pandemic, American Express Co. on Wednesday announced its Enhanced Authorization fraud-detection application is being made available to three major platforms—those of Accertify Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Riskified Ltd.—via an application programming interface. While the …

Just as the Covid-19 pandemic spurred many consumers to turn to online shopping, merchants have experienced a corresponding increase in their chargeback rates. Sixty-eight percent of merchants said the pandemic affected their chargeback rates, found the second annual Chargeback Field Report from Chargebacks911, a chargeback-management platform. Clearwater, Fla.-based Chargebacks911 also …

Vendors of parking apps in North America have an even more potent new competitor with the closing on Tuesday of EasyPark Group’s acquisition of the Park Now Group, which includes Atlanta-based ParkMobile LLC. The deal, which the companies announced in March, brings a major North American stake to Stockholm-based EasyPark, …