Competitive Strategies

Google announced that Google Pay users soon will be able to use the service to make purchases within the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers. Once a card has been added to a Google Pay account, users don’t need to re-enter their payment info. If using Chrome, Google Pay can automatically …

Amazon.com Inc. said Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills is generally available to U.S. merchants and developers. The service enables consumers using Alexa, the voice assistant embedded in Amazon’s Echo devices, to pay for purchases with information already stored in their Amazon accounts. Alexa users grant the merchant’s skill permission to …

Square Inc. reported a strong first quarter late Wednesday, but you wouldn’t know it on Wall Street, where its shares were trading down slightly Thursday morning at just over $47. It closed at $48.70 Wednesday. Despite double-digit increases year-over-year in gross payment volume and net and adjusted revenue, the San …

Since its official launch last June, Zelle has been all about carving out a healthy piece of the burgeoning person-to-person payments market for financial institutions. Now it’s promoting another service that leverages its network but could prove far more lucrative: disbursements. When companies, associations, or other organizations need to pay …

Apple Inc. said revenue from its services, which includes Apple Pay, the App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud, surpassed $9 billion in its second quarter, besting by more than $2 billion the total a year ago. “Apple Pay continues its strong growth with active users more than doubling and transactions …

Strong consumer spending and a benign world economy worked in Mastercard Inc.’s favor in the first quarter, lifting the network’s U.S. purchase volume by nearly 11% and profits by over 30%. The No. 2 payment card network by volume on Wednesday reported that U.S. purchase volume rose 11% to $359 …

Coveted word-of-mouth advertising is failing the mobile-payments services offered by technology giants. That’s the assessment from the Q1-2018 Mobile Pay Tracker report from Auriemma Consulting Group. Though 34% of consumers among the more than 1,500 surveyed use mobile payments—up five points from a year ago—not many are as willing to …

With a push from regulators and competitive forces, banks are stepping up their development of application programming interfaces to enhance their payment and other financial services. APIs, which provide links so that disparate software systems, such as those at a bank and a financial-technology company that wants to offer services …

Toast, a 7-year-old provider of point-of-sale and payments software to restaurants, has launched its first POS device, a handheld that servers can use to accept payments and handle other functions. The device replaces a Samsung model the company used. Commerce platform Shopify Inc. reported transactions from mobile devices amounted to …

Processing giant First Data Corp. said on Monday Walmart Inc. has added Star signature debit acceptance to its roster of payment options. The company also noted that its integrated payments business continues to grow. Both observations came during the Atlanta-based company’s first-quarter earnings call with equity analysts. For the quarter, …