Competitive Strategies

Fleetcor Technologies Inc., a big provider of fleet-fueling, payroll payments, and gift card services, said it has a definitive agreement to acquire Cambridge Global Payments, a Toronto-based processor of cross-border business-to-business payments that handles $20 billion annually in vendor and employee payments for 13,000 companies. The purchase price is C$900 …

The numbers moved in the right direction for Square Inc. in the first quarter, with gross payment volume up 33% and profitability measures improving. But an analyst urged the merchant acquirer to disclose more data about its fast-growing but potentially volatile loan business called Square Capital. San Francisco-based Square reported Wednesday …

Mastercard Inc. reported Tuesday that it switched nearly 17% more transactions in the first quarter than it did a year earlier. Most of the growth came from overseas, but some of it resulted from more U.S. PIN-debit volume, company executives said. Purchase, N.Y.-based Mastercard said it switched 14.7 billion transactions …

• Processing giant First Data Corp. and cross-border payments specialist Flywire Corp. announced a collaboration by which Flywire education and health-care clients will be able to more easily accept cross-border card payments and First Data clients will be able to more readily accept high-value international remittances. • Gro Solutions, a vendor of digital solutions …

The subject of faster payments has been in the news almost continually for months now, but apparently awareness of the subject, and in some cases adoption, remains lower than expected among the financial institutions that will be depended on to implement speedier settlement. That’s if survey results released in April …

With a forecast of 15 billion new devices as part of the Internet of Things potentially coming online as payments devices by 2021, securing these devices, whether they are cars, wearables, or appliances, is emerging as a top concern. “We are seeing a huge increase in inadequately protected devices,” Graeme …

For all the talk by companies about how adopting electronic-payment technologies will streamline their accounts-payable processes, paper checks remain a staple of the business-to-business world. Businesses cut 13.1 billion checks a year, according to check printer Deluxe Corp. To join the advantages of electronic processing with those of paper checks, …

• Former Heartland Payment Systems Inc. chief executive Bob Carr has returned to the payments industry with Beyond, a payments provider. Announced Monday, Beyond, on its Web site, says it will provide payment processing, integrated payments, lending services, and business-management services. Carr had been the leader of Heartland, which Global Payments Inc. acquired for …

The increasing commercialization of mobile payments is showing up in a proliferation of so-called Pays from a bevy of banks, tech companies, and merchants. Time was, a cutting-edge alternative-payment service involved entering card or bank-account details into a branded interface on a laptop computer. Mobile payments were nascent, held back …

Merchants like programs that cover their credit card acceptance costs. So do ISOs and acquirers, some of which see a big opportunity in programs that help merchants with surcharging. Surcharging for credit card transactions or offering a cash discount may have obvious benefits for merchants, but these programs also carry …