Competitive Strategies

A big office lease in downtown Oakland, Calif., suggests merchant processor Square Inc. is about to embark on a big expansion. Square on Thursday signed a lease for an entire 356,000-square-foot building that once was a Sears department store and after that was briefly owned by the ride-sharing firm Uber. …

Pepsi-Cola of the Hudson Valley reached an agreement  with USA Technologies Inc. to install contactless-payment capability on 300 vending machines and to upgrade payment devices on another 1,000 machines already linked to USAT’s ePort Connect Service. Merchant processor Square Inc. agreed to lease an entire 356,000-square-foot building in Oakland, Calif., where …

Merchants have come a long way since the inception of the Merchant Advisory Group, but far more needs to be done to restore some semblance of balance in payments. Upon reflection, it is remarkable that traditional merchants had no formal means to get together to discuss payments until the MAG …

Online merchants expect to battle fraud with added vigor during the holiday-season shopping frenzy. But now data released this week shows how fraud losses, and the costs of managing fraud, plague these merchants year-round. On average, e-commerce merchants sustained 142 successful fraud transactions each month this year, up 12% from …

Mobile-commerce platform PredictSpring said it developed a mobile-shopping app and store-associate app that provides a buy-online, pickup-in-store function for BevMo!, a specialty-beverage retailer. Synchrony Financial announced it will provide private-label credit card services to Qurate Retail Group, parent company of HSN, beginning in 2019. Synchrony also extended existing deals with …

After a lull of more than five months, merchant processor Square Inc. is resuming its attempt to obtain a bank charter. A spokesperson for San Francisco-based Square confirmed Wednesday morning that the company would refile its application the same day. Square in September 2017 filed for an industrial-bank charter from …

Bitcoin has had a bad year, but that isn’t stopping enthusiasts from launching new methods for consumers to buy, sell, and spend the digital currency. The latest introduction is a mobile wallet that allows users to send Bitcoin to contacts on their phone, and receive the currency from others, through …

E-commerce technology provider 3dcart said its merchants can now offer Bread, an online financing service for consumer purchases, to their shoppers. Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) said consumers can redeem rewards points instantly at the pump at approximately 13,400 Shell stations nationwide through a new agreement between FIS and …

Big banks generally aren’t too thrilled about the Federal Reserve taking a direct operational role in a U.S. real-time payment system, but smaller banks and credit unions as well as some big companies support the idea. The Fed’s two-month comment period on its proposed Real Time Gross Settlement service closed …

With the onset of digital wallets, observers of the payments scene might expect consumer demand for cash to wither, and with it the population of ATMs. It turns out the ATM count worldwide did hit its zenith last year, according to research released this week, but the reason is a …