Competitive Strategies

What’s the future of electronic payments? For many consumers, it’s one that incorporates biometrics for authentication and payments, finds a survey from Viewpost IP Holdings LLC, a business-to-business payments provider. In the survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers, Viewpost found that 50% believe fingerprint technology—already in use with many …

Payments provider North American Bancard Holdings LLC said it completed its acquisition of Total Merchant Services Inc. The combined company now processes nearly $50 billion in payments annually. FitPay Inc., a provider of payment-authentication technology, said it will offer prepaid capability on contactless-enabled wearable devices through a FitPay prepaid Mastercard. The program will allow …

Online-payments provider Stripe Inc. now allows merchants on its platform to accept payments from Chinese consumers through links to the China-based Alipay and WeChat Pay systems, Reuters reported. At a valuation of $9.2 billion, 7-year-old Stripe is the most valuable privately held payments startup. Alibaba Group, the China-based online marketplace, has launched the Taobao Group …

Israelis are much more likely to use mobile-banking apps and mobile wallets than Americans, but at least Americans are less inclined to use cash than Germans, according to a recent international survey of consumer usage of financial technology. The May survey of 5,860 adults in the United States, United Kingdom, …

USA Technologies Inc., a provider of contactless-payment devices for vending machines, announced an expanded agreement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to market cashless-payment capability in self-serve markets. Fast-casual restaurant chain Panera Bread Co. gets more than a quarter of its orders through digital order-ahead transactions, and that excludes digital orders that are paid …

The stock market has had a pretty good run so far this year, but shares of publicly traded payments firms are doing even better than the overall market. A group of thirty payment-related stocks tracked by Chicago-based Barrington Research Associates Inc. posted a mean return of 23.86% for the first …

Merchant cash-advance provider CAN Capital Inc. said it has returned to funding following a recapitalization by Varadero Capital, an alternative asset manager. CAN Capital said it will immediately begin funding small merchants eligible for renewal. It will work with a select set of sales partners for new merchant advances. Its products include term …

In a play for scale in a rapidly expanding e-commerce market, Vantiv Inc. on Wednesday agreed to buy the United Kingdom-based processor Worldpay Group plc for approximately $9.9 billion. JPMorgan Chase & Co., which had also expressed interest in Worldpay, has withdrawn from the bidding. The boards of the two …

Mobile-wallet transactions in the United States grew 333% from 2012 through 2015, albeit on a relatively small base, according to data released Friday by the Federal Reserve. Wallets generated 1.3 billion payments in 2015, the Fed data show, versus 300 million transactions three years earlier. That robust rate of growth …

What’s the measure of a well-performing payment gateway? Time. Or, rather a lack of time. Gateways, which route online transactions to one of multiple payment processors, are judged on their speediness and reliability. That’s why The Strawhecker Group, an Omaha, Neb.-based payments consultancy, started its Gateway Enterprise Metrics platform. The …