Competitive Strategies

As cryptocurrency values increase and draw more attention, individuals with ill intent are looking to hijack smart phones and desktop computers to mine digital currencies. Opera Software AS, a Norway-based browser developer, wants to prevent that for users of its technology. Opera introduced an anti-mining feature to its mobile browser …

About a year later than it intended, Amazon.com Inc. on Monday opened to the public an 1,800-square-foot convenience store in Seattle that promises to streamline physical shopping and payment as the company has for decades smoothed out the wrinkles in e-commerce. Along with Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition last year of …

China-based smart-phone maker OnePlus, which sells phones in the U.S. and dozens of other countries, confirmed that its Web site was hacked, potentially exposing the credit card information of 40,000 customers as they entered card data on the oneplus.net site between mid-November and Jan. 11. OnePlus said it is notifying …

Unlike its rivals Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., American Express Inc. depends crucially on revenue from the fees it charges merchants for acceptance. These fees, in fact, account for 57% of the company’s overall revenues net of interest expense. So it came as no surprise that AmEx’s top brass spent …

Bank of America Corp. this week said fourth-quarter purchase volume on its debit cards rose 6% year over year to $77.9 billion. Debit card purchases for all of 2017 totaled $298.6 billion, up 5% from $285.6 billion in 2016. BofA claimed 24.2 million active mobile-banking customers at year’s end, up …

Visa Inc. CEO Alfred Kelly told CNBC that Bitcoin currently is a “speculative commodity” and not “a payment-system player.” Visa only will process fiat currency transactions, Kelly said at the National Retail Federation’s annual conference this week in New York. Varo Money Inc. said it raised $45 million in a …

With the merger between Vantiv Inc. and Worldpay plc finalized, the combined organization, known as Worldpay Inc., will get to the tasks at hand, says Shane Happach, Worldpay executive vice president and head of its global enterprise e-commerce. Chief among them will be developing its technology and growing the company, …

Flywire Corp., which since its start in 2011 has focused on international payments, on Thursday announced it has acquired OnPlan Holdings LLC, a Bannockburn, Ill.-based company that specializes in payments and receivables management for the health-care and education markets. Financial terms were not announced. OnPlan, with its units OnPlanHealth and …

Mobile remote deposit capture transactions jumped 35% in 2017 over the previous year thanks to an increase in users, a software firm specializing in digital-banking applications for community banks and credit unions reports. “For banks and credit unions live for all of 2017, mobile deposits grew by an average of …

Financial-services providers experienced a 105% increase in the fraudster attack rate from 2015 through 2017, reports ThreatMetrix Inc., an authentication and fraud-mitigation provider, in its “Cybercrime Report 2017: A Year in Review,” released on Tuesday. E-commerce merchants, too, experienced greater fraud, with the log-in attack rate growing by 170% from …