Competitive Strategies

For decades, payments progress has been measured by how much friction disappears between initiation and transaction. Checks and cash gave way to credit cards. Credit cards gave way to digital wallets. And now, stablecoins are emerging as a new payments rail, with the potential to change how businesses move and …

Motorola launched its moto watch ultra, the latest version in its line of moto watches. The device includes Google Wallet and NFC capability for payments, among other features. MassPay, a platform enabling businesses to send money to 180 countries, launched MassPay Collect, which allows businesses to receive funds in stablecoins. Diameter …

Financial institutions pondering how FedNow, the real-time payment service from the Federal Reserve, might fit into their product sets will have a new incentive to factor in when the FedNow discount program begins Jan. 1. Eligible FIs could receive a minimum of a $5,000 discount when enabling FedNow receive capabilities. …

Shopline, a commerce platform, has agreed to integrate card-linked installment payments capability from Splitit. Finzly, a money-movement platform operating on ACH and real-time rails, has launched Assure, a service intended to protect banks against attacks by rogue AI agents. The new service is part of Finzly’s Agentic Galaxy set of AI …

Block Inc. will make its proprietary Cash App Score available to external lenders for the first time, while its Square acquiring unit lines up another retailer for its suite of point-of-sale services and hardware. A scoring model once only used internally by Block for its set of lending products now …

OpenPayd, a London-based provider of open-banking and stablecoin services, announced an expansion into the U.S. market, having acquired 43 state money-transfer licenses. Globally, the company processes more than $300 billion in volume yearly for more than 1,200 businesses. The announcement comes following OpenPayd’s integration this month of MSB USA Inc., …

Surcharging provider Yeeld said it is working with Housecall Pro, a platform supporting home-service professionals, to enable surcharging on credit card payments. CheckAlt said it will provide payment processing to LoanPro, a lending platform, to handle both paper-check and online-banking payments from LoanPro customers. Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it will support ticketless entry and …

ACI Worldwide Inc. announced an agreement to acquire Cranium Ventures, a developer of technology for switching card-based transactions. Cranium will become part of ACI’s Connetic for Cards payments-orchestration unit, launched in March. ACI says its various units process more than 300 billion card transactions per year. Terms of the deal, which …

Array US Inc. and Narmi want to enable banks to offer consumer-finance management tools to their customers with a suite of products, including subscription management. Array, a fintech platform, and Narmi, a digital-banking platform, say the collaboration—called Narmi FinHealth—will give financial institutions an easier way to provide these tools to …