Competitive Strategies

Finally, the rumors can stop. Sage Payment Solutions, the U.S. merchant-services arm of Sage Group plc, has been sold to GTCR LLC, a Chicago-based private-equity firm, for $260 million, GTCR announced Friday. Reports of a possible sale of the company, which counts approximately 100,000 merchants in its portfolio, originally surfaced …

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By Jim Daly and John Stewart The U.S. conversion to EMV is close to two years old now, and in its wake have come unquestioned benefits. But this cure for widespread counterfeit card fraud also has ushered in excruciating side effects. It’s easy to forget that the Europay-Mastercard-Visa chip card …

By Kevin Woodward A willingness to listen, knowledge of the industry and of the merchant, and preparation are key to skirting a merchant’s rebuff reflex. It’s a universal sales-agent experience. The rebuff, deflection, or outright rejection from a merchant who, in her mind, is yet again hearing a sales rep …

By René Pelegero The Fed’s task force has made a lot of progress, and on some fronts the results look promising. So why does it seem like the creation story of Visa and Mastercard all over again? It has been a long time since the initial Faster Payments discussions in …

• Marking an end to American Express Co.’s cobranded card losing streak, hotel chain Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. named AmEx as its exclusive credit card issuer effective Jan. 1, according to Bloomberg. AmEx and Citigroup Inc., which took over issuance of the Costco Wholesale Corp. cobranded card from AmEx a year …

Financial institutions and third-party providers of digital person-to-person payments may have the same goal—ubiquity of service and adoption—but they’ll have to take different paths to get there, according to “Digital Person-to-Person Payments in the U.S.: The Competitive Landscape,” a report released last week by the Aite Group LLC. The P2P …

• POS Portal Inc., a point-of-sale equipment distributor, said it is now supplying payment equipment via Retail Realm, a POS software distributor. • Merchant processor Global Payments Inc. said it is providing payment technology for Hyundai Motor UK’s “Click To Buy” platform, which lets consumers buy a car online from any participating …

While the benefits of electronic transactions for health-care payments—reduced operating costs, efficient processing, enhanced reliability, and strengthened security—are widely acknowledged, the health-care industry has faced many challenges keeping pace with standard electronic-payment adoption rates. And the problem will only get worse unless payment-solution providers expand their offerings to support the …

Just six months after declaring that it intended to become a player in the independent software vendor (ISV) payments space, processor First Data Corp. late Monday said it has a deal to buy a prominent ISV, CardConnect Corp., for $750 million. “CardConnect has been investing in technology, dedicated sales, and specialized …