Competitive Strategies

In the hotly contested person-to-person payment business, financial institutions have felt left behind by technology impresarios like PayPal Holdings Inc. and Square Inc. that have entered the market over the past few years with slick P2P apps. But on Monday, the banks’ Zelle network released fresh numbers indicating healthy growth …

Long confirmation times and hefty transaction fees have pushed some Bitcoin backers to back away from the digital currency in recent weeks, but now there are signs that one of those problems is easing significantly while the other is growing much worse. The median transaction fee stood at $5.69 as …

What impact might the PCI Security Standards Council’s recently released spec enabling PIN on glass transactions with commercially available, off-the-shelf devices have on mobile point-of-sale equipment sales? http://ow.ly/k2h030i1yQs  #payments #survey

Investors gave Starbucks Corp. the cold shoulder Friday morning on news that despite a record $6.1 billion in quarterly revenues, growth is slowing in the United States. But the coffee giant’s payments business has several initiatives brewing, executives reported late Thursday. A leader in closed-loop prepaid cards and mobile payments …

Fraud-prevention specialist Tender Armor LLC intends to use the proceeds from its latest funding round to hire more personnel and launch its marketing efforts. Announced Thursday, the funding round, for an unspecified amount (though characterized as “multimillion”), is a big step in growing the startup, says Madeline K. Aufseeser, chief …

Bitcoin may have slipped from the near $20,000 price it commanded a little over a month ago, but it’s still selling for around $11,000, nearly a dozen times its value a year ago. That’s drawing in plenty of investors and other high rollers, but it’s also attracting average citizens, including …

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced changes to its controversial prepaid accounts rule and extended its effective date by one year, to April 2019. The changes will adjust error-resolution requirements for prepaid card providers and will make it easier for consumers to link credit card accounts to digital wallets, some …

Payments provider CCBill LLC completed an integration with DatingPro, which provides software for dating sites. NationPay, a blockchain-based payments startup, announced its launch. Twenty app markets, including Apple’s App Store and Alphabet’s Google Play, are still hosting 661 Bitcoin apps blacklisted by cybersecurity vendors because hackers use them to attempt …

With voice commerce expected to grow from 18 million users last year to 78 million by 2022, according to Business Insider, sellers of all sorts are starting to pay attention to the technology’s potential to create new transaction markets—and perhaps steal volume from mobile devices. Early enthusiasts for voice are …

Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch subsidiary on Monday announced enhanced capabilities for its Virtual Payables service, including the ability by corporate card-using businesses to create single-use account numbers in real time. In addition to the single-use card numbers, businesses with a BofA Merrill purchasing card can connect directly to …