Competitive Strategies

Klarna AB said an exclusive agreement with checkout and payments provider Bolt Financial Inc. will allow Klarna to integrate its payment options with Bolt’s CheckoutOS. The move is expected to allow merchants to offer Klarna’s payment options directly at checkout. Bolt says more than 80 million consumers use its one-click checkout …

Digital-publishing and -services provider Adobe Inc. this week announced two additions to its Adobe Commerce e-commerce package, including a new cloud-based service. And Bolt Financial Inc. unveiled its Bolt Connect service, which the company says will help online marketplaces onboard merchants faster and streamline operations. San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe introduced …

Credit card issuers and others relying on the credit bureau Experian plc to aid with decisions about extending services to consumers will be able to tie into Experian’s integration of Mastercard Inc.’s identity-verification and fraud-prevention tech in the Experian Ascend Platform. Announced Thursday, the integration means users of the Ascend …

Skyfire, a provider of payment and identity technology for AI agents, has launched AI Agent Checkout, technology said to be programmed specifically for transactions conducted via AI agents. Payments-software developer Weave Communications Inc. has appointed Adrian McDermott to its board of directors. McDermott is chief technology officer at ZenDesk.

It’s not a secret how cloud-based connectivity has changed payments, and now a quantifiable 78% of all point-of-sale product providers have at least one cloud-based POS product, finds the 2025 Directory of POS providers from TSG, an Omaha, Neb.-based payments advisory firm. The directory, which catalogs more than 5,500 data …

PayPal Holdings Inc. will process payments from universities to student athletes under multi-year deals the payments company announced early Thursday. PayPal’s agreements with the Big 10 and Big 12 college conferences follows a court ruling June 6 that permits colleges and universities to include student athletes in a revenue share. …

In partnership with Xsolla, a provider of videogame-commerce platforms, Affirm Inc. has agreed to offer its payments options through online-game developers. Square, a unit of Block Inc. released its Square Handheld device in the United Kingdom. Square launched the device in May in the United States. Stablecoin-card issuer Rain said it will work with Toku, a …

Building on its three-year partnership with the big entertainment promoter Live Nation in Canada, Block Inc.’s Square unit said Wednesday it will roll out point-of-sale payments at the new Rogers Stadium in Toronto, starting June 29. Rogers Stadium stands to become a major new seasonal transaction source for Square, which …

Xero Ltd., an accounting and payments firm, announced it will acquire the payments platform Melio Inc. for $2.5 billion upfront, with another $500 million in payments tied to performance targets. The commerce platform NuOrder by Lightspeed launched Order Trends, a compilation of statistics aimed at informing merchants’ buying decisions. Canada-based fintech Nuvei Corp. said …

Stablecoins are the talk of the payments town, and some observers are questioning whether these new digital alternatives could undercut the core network businesses of Mastercard and Visa. Now, Mastercard Inc. has announced several initiatives it says will keep it in the thick of the growing stablecoin market. In a …