Competitive Strategies

Remember the Pokémon GO craze? The game was a megahit because it cleverly combined the physical and digital worlds. It added an augmented contextual layer so players could use smart-phone map and camera functions to interact with characters, other players, and game elements. What if a similar augmentation toolkit were available …

• Mobile-payments provider LevelUp said it has closed a $50 million funding round with participation by existing investor JPMorgan Chase & Co. as well as US Boston and CentroCredit Bank. LevelUp, which says its user count is nearly 1 million, is the subject of a lawsuit by competitor CardFree Inc. alleging LevelUp fraudulently …

Shareholders of MoneyGram International Inc. voted overwhelmingly in favor of Ant Financial Services Group’s planned $1.2 billion acquisition of their company, Dallas-based MoneyGram announced Tuesday. A preliminary tally shows 97% of the shares voted were in favor of the deal and represented more than 82% of all outstanding shares, MoneyGram …

When it comes to establishing merchant acceptance in North America, Alipay’s ambitions go well beyond niche markets. In fact, “When we’re looking at partners, we’re looking for ubiquity,” Souheil Badran, president of Alipay North America, tells Digital Transactions News in a wide-ranging interview. Those partners so far include First Data …

Thanks in part to its acquisition of a Florida independent sales organization nearly a year ago, merchant acquirer JetPay Corp. on Monday reported that its first-quarter revenues increased 63% to $18.9 million from $11.6 million in the year-ago period. JetPay’s Payment Services segment, its biggest unit, saw revenues jump by …

The number of consumers using at least one of the major third-party mobile-payment services—Apple Pay, Android Pay, or Samsung Pay—will top 150 million globally by the of 2017, says Juniper Research, a U.K.-based firm, in its “Is OEM-Pay the Future of Contactless” report. Some 50 million of them will begin …

• EVO Payments International announced it purchased the remaining ownership interest in Zenith Merchant Services, a Montreal-based payments provider. Terms were not disclosed. • Payments processor Computer Services Inc. has integrated data from Dow Jones Risk & Compliance for sanctions screening to help clients control the risk of doing business with politically …

It could be taken as a sign of how competitive the order-ahead-and-pay feature has become in the rapidly developing market for mobile payments. In a lawsuit filed in federal court on May 2, CardFree Inc. has accused rival mobile-payments developer Scvngr Inc. of fraudulently accessing CardFree’s technology to process orders …

Efforts to make the EMV payment process more appealing to consumers and merchants got another boost with Mastercard Inc.’s announcement Thursday that point-of-sale equipment maker VeriFone Systems Inc. and payment processor Global Payments Inc. now support the card brand’s M/Chip Fast protocol. The protocol, announced a year ago, enables developers …

• The National Retail Federation on Friday launched a multimedia advertising campaign urging the House of Representatives to protect the Durbin Amendment. The campaign, which includes radio commercials targeting the districts of key Congressmen who have expressed support for repealing Durbin, comes as the House prepares to take up the Financial …