Competitive Strategies

Banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. is discontinuing its Chase Liquid general-purpose reloadable prepaid card and replacing it with a checking account called Chase Secure Banking, which has many of the same features but requires the customer to open a Chase bank account. Launched in 2012 and aimed mainly at …

As if the announcement of its pending merger with Fidelity National Information Services Inc. wasn’t enough news for one week, Worldpay Inc. on Wednesday said it will acquire Amazon Pay transactions for online merchants. The news means Cincinnati-based Worldpay has become the first merchant acquirer to work with the retailing …

The decision by Cboe Global Markets Inc. to shut down its Bitcoin futures market, news of which emerged late last week, may have been seen as yet another blow to the digital currency’s bid for mainstream respectability. But in some respects Bitcoin may not be any worse off for the …

So-called shoppable ads could get a big boost if a tap-and-buy test announced Tuesday by Facebook Inc.’s Instagram social network succeeds, a test in which PayPal Holdings Inc. is the payment processor. Other social networks and Internet sites have rolled out or begun testing shoppable ads, including Pinterest, Snap Inc.’s …

Fifty-nine percent of consumers cited the ability to pay quickly as a reason they use peer-to-peer payments apps, according to a survey of more than 380 consumers from Tallwave, a digital-services firm. More than 65% have used PayPal and 37% have used Venmo, PayPal’s P2P payment service. Verifi Inc. launched …

The other shoe has dropped. Fidelity National Information Services Inc.’s $43-billion cash-and-stock deal to acquire Worldpay Inc., announced early Monday, will create a processing behemoth that will compete globally across a sweeping range of payments businesses, including merchant acquiring, e-commerce, faster payments, and core processing. And though the bosses of …

Close observers of the payment-processing industry predicted Fiserv Inc. would start a merger wave when it announced its $22 billion deal to acquire First Data Corp. in January. That prophecy seems to have come true with the even bigger $43 billion FIS-Worldpay merger announced Monday, and the consolidation wave probably hasn’t …

SpotOn Transact LLC said it will integrate Poynt Inc.’s smart point-of-sale terminal into its platform. SpotOn said it is the first to work with Poynt to integrate loyalty, marketing, and POS software directly into the terminal hardware. Synchrony Financial expanded the merchant categories eligible to accept its Synchrony Car Care …

In a time when criminal access to consumer data has never been more common, merchants continue to experience pervasive and persistent fraud attempts. That’s the key takeaway from the 2019 sixth annual Fraud Attack Index from Forter Inc. released Thursday. How bad is the problem? Fraud grew in 2018 in …

First Data Corp. began talking with a potential merger partner identified only as ‘Party A’ more than a year before Fiserv Inc.’s $22 billion takeover offer for the big payment processor was announced, according to a proxy statement Fiserv and First Data filed this week. The lengthy document—more than 300 …