Competitive Strategies

In the hotly competitive restaurant point-of-sale market, acquirers are constantly devising new products and enticements to attract these merchants. To that end, SpotOn Transact LLC said Monday it has released three new point-of-sale devices for restaurants, and Shift4 Payments Inc. has enlisted hospitality expert Jon Taffer in a contest. Announced …

PayPal Holdings Inc. announced early Monday it is launching a version of its Venmo peer-to-peer payment service tailored for teenagers. With the new program, parents holding a Venmo account can open one for a child aged 13 to 17 that will include a Mastercard debit card. Parents can exercise control …

The share of all payments using cash declined only modestly to 18% in 2022 from 20% in 2021, while the share of in-person and person-to-person payments has stayed constant at 81%, according to the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice from the Federal Reserve System’s FedCash Services. Sunmi Technology Co., a China-based point-of-sale …

Small businesses in Canada will reap lower interchange rates in that country, the Department of Finance Canada announced Thursday. The deal suggests a similar reduction is possible in the United States, the Merchant Payments Coalition quickly responded. Both Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. agreed to lower the domestic consumer credit …

Presto Automation Inc., a provider of voice ordering and other payments technology for drive-through restaurants, reported March-quarter revenue of $6.6 million, down 12% year-over-year. The company says it swung to a net loss of $15.7 million, compared to a gain last year of $9 million, owing to a change in the fair …

Galileo Financial Technologies LLC has reached an agreement with Amazon.com to make its platform available to buyers on Amazon’s AWS Marketplace. AWS marketplace is a digital catalog that features software listings from independent software vendors. Businesses use it to find software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit …

Few, if any, business sectors are as hotly competitive these days for payments providers as hospitality, and in particular, restaurants. Major firms from Block Inc.’s Square unit to Toast Inc. to Shift4 Payments Inc. have big stakes in this market. But that hasn’t stopped one other entrant, Lightspeed Commerce Inc., …

Blockchain company Ripple unveiled its Ripple CBDC Platform, technology supporting central banks, governments, and financial institutions in issuing central bank digital currencies. More than 90% of the world’s countries are at some stage of development toward a CBDC, according to the Atlantic Council. Matera, a U.S.-based instant payment and QR code technology …

Sezzle is fine-tuning the buy now, pay later experience with the debut of its Pay-in-2 product. Just as its name suggests, the new product splits transactions into two payments, which can help expand BNPL to new categories, such as grocery, monthly subscriptions, and other high-frequency categories, Sezzle says. Consumers choosing …

A startup fintech called Engage has launched a communication channel allowing customers and merchants to interact via purchase transactions through card networks. In the hotly contested hospitality point-of-sale market, Lightspeed Commerce Inc. launched the newest version of its Lightspeed Restaurant set of technologies, which is immediately available in the U.S. market. Security firm Sophos said it …