Competitive Strategies

Landing a coveted merchant account is a top goal for many banks and payment technology firms, but banks may be at a disadvantage. It can cost up to 2.3 times more, on average $496, for a financial institution to onboard a merchant for payment services, as a paytech may spend …

Klarna AB said more than 1 million consumers have signed up for its Klarna Card since the product debuted in the U.S. market July 4. The daily signup rate for the debit card reached 50,000 on Tuesday. The news follows the company’s announcement last month that it has become an in-store payment method …

SoundHound AI Inc., a provider of artificial intelligence-based voice technology, said Red Lobster Hospitality LLC will roll out SoundHound’s AI-powered phone-ordering system across the restaurant chain’s more than 500 locations. The system will enable SoundHound to field all incoming calls for takeout orders, provide answers to common customer questions, such …

Artificial-intelligence tools continue to find their way into the payments system. Two companies, Seon and Sigma360, are the latest to incorporate AI into new products. Austin, Texas-based Seon Technologies Ltd. says its new AI suite can help reduce manual review times on transactions by up to 50%. It does this by …

Chargeback Gurus introduced its VAMP Risk Calculator, aimed at assisting merchants in calculating their financial liability under the Visa Acquiring Monitoring Program, which will be enforced as of Oct. 1. PayPal Holdings Inc. has agreed to sell, over a two-year period, approximately $7 billion in buy now, pay later receivables originated in …

Finastra, a London-based payment software provider, has added an ACH module to its Global PAYplus end-to-end payment processing solution. The new module will provide financial institutions with an alternative to legacy ACH processing systems, which can be less efficient and have limited scalability. With the addition of an ACH module, …

Mastercard Inc. is working with Alipay+, Ant International’s wallet, to introduce near-field communication capability for overseas transactions on Kakao Pay, a mobile wallet in South Korea. In related news, Mastercard launched its Global Reach Partner Program, aimed at easing expansion into new markets for merchants through consulting and advice. Paga Group, an African …

SpotOn Transact LLC has launched DayCheck, an earned-tip payment app that automates employee tip payouts for restaurants. The app, which integrates with SpotOn’s Teamwork labor-management platform, automatically calculates tips earned by employees. After tips have been calculated, the information flows into Teamwork, which records the payouts in the payroll report, …

Paysafe Ltd. will process payments for online-trading and investment platform CMC Markets under a newly announced agreement. Some 83% of U.S. executives think that by 2027 most payments will be assisted in some fashion by artificial intelligence, but 25% report they’re losing at least $1 million a year at online checkout, …

Two reports, one from Mastercard Inc. and another from Omnisend, an email and SMS marketing platform for e-commerce businesses, indicate that sales during the 2025 holiday season will grow at a slower rate than the previous year as consumers wrestle with higher prices due to inflation and tariffs.  The Mastercard …