Competitive Strategies

The U.S. Treasury Dept.’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, plans to create a special-purpose national bank charter for financial technology companies, a booming field in which payments firms play prominent roles. Comptroller of the Currency Thomas J. Curry divulged the planned charter during a speech Friday at …

Few consumers like waiting in lines to pay, especially at grocery stores. One California grocery chain is taking steps to make it easier for shoppers pay for their purchases with the launch of a self-checkout app. The California Fresh Market location in San Luis Opisbo, Calif., is using Future Proof …

• In a study of more than 900,000 merchants, processor First Data Corp. says retail spending from Thanksgiving through CyberMonday (Nov. 28) grew 5.8% from year-earlier levels; brick-and-mortar retailers saw spending grow 4.1% while e-commerce spending jumped 14.3%. • European software firm Comtrade Digital Services has built an automated banking platform for the Viber messaging app, …

In a move that expands its business as a provider of risk-control services for merchants and card issuers, Visa Inc. announced Thursday that it has a deal to acquire e-commerce payment-authentication provider CardinalCommerce Corp. Founded in 1999, Mentor, Ohio-based CardinalCommerce’s signature product is Cardinal Secure Authentication, a service that uses …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Stripe Inc.’s latest funding round, in which the privately held San Francisco-based company nearly doubled its valuation to $9.2 billion, shows what startups can do if they’re innovating in the right sector of payments, experts say. Just six years old, Stripe provides tools for payments online …

• Processor Jack Henry & Associates Inc. will resell the Zelle person-to-person payments service to its financial-institution clients under a new agreement with Zelle’s owner, Early Warning Services LLC. • Affirm Inc., whose technology allows consumers to pay over time for online purchases, said it is now integrated with four new e-commerce …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Can First Data Corp. shake its reputation as the aircraft carrier of the payments industry, a behemoth processor that is anything but nimble? It can, according to a new report from a securities firm. “First Data becoming increasingly competitive,” says the headline in the report by Chicago-based …

By John Stewart@DTPaymentNews Buoyed by seismic political and financial events, the Bitcoin digital currency is picking up momentum in both its value and its adoption. Blockchain, a U.K. company that offers Bitcoin services, last week celebrated having issued 10 million wallets since its founding in 2011. That’s a doubling in …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews New York-based iPayment Holdings Inc. has named O.B. Rawls IV chief executive and president and charged the veteran payments executive with guiding the payments company’s plans to increase sales . Rawls, whose prior experience includes First Data Corp., also joins the iPayment board of directors. He has …

• The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued final approval of a $37.5 million settlement in a class-action case, Reyes v. Zions First National Bank, attorneys for the class announced. In the case, plaintiffs alleged Zions Bank and a former payment-processing subsidiary knowingly handled payments for fraudulent …