Acquiring

Fully 25% of U.S. merchants that accept payment cards experienced a drop of 56% or more in card volume in April compared with February, finds a new study from The Strawhecker Group. After analyzing billions of transactions from more than 1 million card-accepting merchants across the United States, the Omaha, …

Visa Inc. appointed Chris Newkirk as chief strategy officer, a newly created position in which he will lead strategic planning for Visa overall and work with Visa’s regional teams. Newkirk, who will report to chairman and CEO Al Kelly, comes to Visa from Capital One Financial Corp., where he held a …

Pundits have argued for weeks that the Covid-19 pandemic is shifting consumer payment habits away from anything that requires touching publicly available devices, and now that trend is showing up in that most mundane of activities, parking a car. To be sure, parking transactions even via a mobile app have …

In its first “State of Spend” report, loyalty platform provider Cardlytics Inc., which develops offers for customers of some of the nation’s largest banks based on transaction data, says spending on streaming services rose 24% year-over-year in the March 12-April 29 period.Digital-payments and banking-services provider i2c Inc. said it is supporting Crypto.com as …

ACI Worldwide Inc. said its real-time payments platform, UP Immediate Payments, has added application programming interfaces to ease integration with mobile wallets, e-commerce portals, bill-pay apps, social-media payments, and other applications.Payments provider Klarna AB said it has an agreement with musical-instrument maker Fender to provide a payment option offering four equal installments on …

A new report from CardFlight Inc., a point-of-sale technology provider serving more than 60,000 small businesses through its SwipeSimple service, shows merchant activity climbing back to just about where it was in early March when the Covid-19 outbreak began to hit the economy hard. Total sales in the SwipeSimple merchant …

Point-of-sale lender LendingUSA LLC launched an instant ID-verification capability, which involves applicants using a smart phone to take and transmit photos of government-issued ID cards and selfie photos. The company says its merchant base exceeds 8,000 nationally.A startup called Skyflow said it has raised $7.5 million in a seed funding round aimed at developing …

Citcon USA LLC said Tulip Retail Inc., a provider of mobile apps used by store clerks at major retail chains, will deploy Citcon’s mobile-payments technology to enable acceptance of Alipay, WeChat Pay, and UnionPay QR. A 5-year-old startup company, Citcon specializes in enabling U.S. merchants to accept China-based mobile-payments apps. …

Working with an unnamed partner, commerce platform Shopify Inc. said it will launch Shop Pay Installments later this year. The option will let consumers at checkout split purchases into four equal installments at no interest.In related news, point-of-sale installment lender PayBright said Canadian fashion retailer Groupe Dynamite is offering PayBright’s service on the merchant’s …

Forty-five percent of U.S. consumers are ordering online more often than usual as a result of restrictions stemming from Covid-19, and 34% are making more purchases with contactless or mobile-payment options, according to an online survey of 807 U.S. adults by Auriemma Group, a financial-services consulting firm. The firm also surveyed consumers …