Competitive Strategies

Rent, the 12-times-a-year installment payment many consumers make, could benefit from splitting further into two payments a month, suggests a study released by Flexible Finance Inc., also known as Flex. New York City-based Flex commissioned the study, which was completed by San Francisco-based research firm MetroSight. Flex enables tenants to …

MassPay, a payment platform enabling businesses to send payments globally, said it has integrated three new services via agreements with providers—account name inquiry, account validation services, and bank account and name validation. Young Kim, a U.S. Congresswoman from California, has proposed the Strengthening Transaction Oversight and Preventing Payments Fraud Act, aimed at allowing …

Celero Commerce, an active buyer of other payments companies across its relatively brief time in the transaction-processing business, is itself the target of an acquisition in a $625-million deal announced early Thursday. The buyer is Deluxe Corp., which sees the acquisition bulking up its position in providing payments and data …

U.S. Bank’s Elavon processing unit said it has expanded its All-In-One payments service across North America for in-store, mobile, and online transactions. The service relies on a partnership with POS device provider Castles Technology. ACI Worldwide Inc. warned that fraud indications it has seen in relation to prior major tournaments are emerging as …

Shopify Inc.’s latest update to its point-of-sale and e-commerce platform makes artificial intelligence commerce uses central, enabling its merchants to more easily adopt agentic commerce as a channel. The Spring platform update, which includes more than 150 revisions, adds support for sign in with Shop, its consumer-facing app and marketplace, …

Boston-based Toast Inc. is stepping back to its early efforts to develop its point-of-sale products with the Toast Lab collaboration. Toast Lab will see the POS system maker work with a restaurant operator in the Boston area on new POS products and services. Toast says it will provide funding and …

PayIt, a payments provider for state and local governments, launched PayIt Smart Works, a slate of AI-enabled functions for back-office operations, including consolidation of payment, banking, and remittance data. Banking-technology provider Mercury launched Mercury Command, an AI-based platform enabling users to make payments and conduct other financial business via natural-language command. Sutton …

Count processor Adyen N.V. as another payments company preparing for the expected growth in agentic commerce. Its launch of Adyen Agentic will make it easier for merchants on the platform to incorporate agentic commerce into their sales channels, Adyen says. With the foundations of agentic commerce which IBM defines as …

As e-commerce volumes climb, Early Warning Services LLC has been pushing its Paze online checkout service in a national campaign that started earlier this month. The latest chapter in that effort arrived early Tuesday with the news that Paze will award a $10 statement credit to users who use the …