Competitive Strategies

American Express Co. formed its Digital Labs unit less than a year ago, and it has plenty to do as it evaluates new payment forms and new ways to attract cardholders and merchants. Digital Labs is concerned with digital payments, digital ways of engaging with cardholders, and research and development, …

More mobile and contactless opportunities may be in the future for debit card issuers. The 2018 Debit Issuer Study from Houston-based Pulse Network, released this week, found 12.2% of debit cards were enrolled in Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay as of January, up from 6.3% in January 2017. Debit card enrollment …

Grubhub, an online and mobile food-ordering marketplace, closed on its previously announced acquisition of LevelUp, a mobile-payments and -promotions platform, for $390 million in cash. Dream Payments, a digital-payments platform provider, released an application programming interface that allows insurers to link to the Dream Payments Hub as well as Mastercard …

Surcharges and discounts for cash aren’t brand-new pricing tactics, but interest in them by independent sales organizations is rising because of falling legal barriers and the potential profits. Repeated sessions about the topic were packed Thursday at the Western States Acquirers Association annual conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. The presenter was Ryan …

Consumers using PayByPhone’s app for paid parking now have another option to extend their parking time. The Volkswagen AG-owned company launched a feature for Apple Watch users to add more parking time directly from the watch without using an iPhone or visiting the meter again. The PayByPhone Apple Watch app shows …

FreedomPay, a payments provider specializing in sports stadiums and hospitality venues, announced a multiyear agreement with Lincoln Financial Field, the home stadium for the Philadelphia Eagles, to process payments at more than 300 points of sale. Revenue from so-called over-the-top content-subscription platforms will rise dramatically in part because of streamlined …

Payments officials have sensed it for some time, and now the numbers confirm it: Fraud attacks via mobile devices worldwide soared 24% in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2017, totaling 150 million. In the United States alone, the increase was much worse, fully …

The topic of faster payments has won plenty of publicity in recent years, but less celebrated is the mundane business of crediting merchant accounts. That’s getting faster, too, and the latest development is a service called Funds Now, which PayPal Holdings Inc. announced Tuesday. With this service, online merchants in …

Mobile contactless payments are growing at a nearly 31% compounded annual rate and will exceed $1 trillion worldwide by 2022, according to a new forecast from 451 Research. The prediction is contained 451’s Global Unified Commerce Forecast, which estimates that total online commerce accounts for about 10% of purchases currently, …

Rambus Inc. announced its token gateway for e-commerce is one of the first such services to be certified by the Visa Ready program. The gateway streamlines links to the Visa Token Service to tokenize payment credentials for merchants, payment service providers, and merchants. Mobile-payments specialist Glance Technologies Inc. said its …