Competitive Strategies

• Merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems introduced Heartland Insights, a data and analytics service for restaurants that relies on the company’s point-of-sale and e-commerce solutions. Heartland recently became part of rival processor Global Payments Inc. • Canadian payments provider Beanstream expanded its service to U.S. merchants and integrated partners with …

Holders of the Walmart MoneyCard issued by Green Dot Corp.’s bank subsidiary have resorted to social media in the past few days to complain of not being able to check account balances or use their cards to make purchases and withdraw money from ATMs. The extent of the glitch is …

Cardless ATM technology that enables consumers to make cash withdrawals is now available via Android Pay at select Bank of America Corp. locations, the banking giant announced Wednesday at Google’s annual IO conference. BofA says the service has initially been available at some ATMs in Boston, Charlotte, N.C., New York …

Venture funding for payments companies may have slowed dramatically in recent months, but that’s not the case across the board. Bitcoin and blockchain startups in particular uncorked a geyser of cash in the first quarter, with dollars invested totaling $173 million on 39 deals, according to data released this week …

Members of Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime membership service are enthusiastic users of the e-retail giant’s payments service, which it makes available to other merchants. In fact, some 50% of Amazon Pay’s users belong to Prime, according to Amazon Pay vice president Patrick Gauthier, who spoke with Digital Transactions News Tuesday at …

• Fitness-band vendor Fitbit Inc. has acquired the wearable-payments assets of Coin in a deal that closed May 12 and includes relevant personnel and intellectual property. Terms were not disclosed. Coin, which was part of a wearable-payments initiative announced earlier this year by MasterCard Inc., is best-known for a device that …

The increasingly dramatic proxy fight at prepaid card issuer Green Dot Corp., a fight that could cost its founder, chairman, and chief executive Steven W. Streit his job if management loses, took an interesting turn Monday when Green Dot said it would appoint George Gresham, a director nominee from the …

After eight months of experimentation in Columbus, Ohio, Merchant Customer Exchange LLC on Monday issued a statement from chief executive Brian Mooney announcing it is putting off a national rollout of its CurrentC mobile-payments service to an unspecified date. Mooney added that the Boston-based company, formed in 2012 by many …

Payments startup Payzing Inc. is banking that a digital-currency integration with Uphold, a virtual funds and commodity platform, will lead to e-commerce success. San Francisco-based Payzing uses Uphold’s blockchain technology to offer online merchants an alternate payment method to traditional credit and debit cards. Consumers use their Uphold accounts to …

Despite a 66% increase in shipments of EMV chip cards to U.S. credit and debit card issuers in the first quarter, shares of CPI Card Group Inc. plunged as much as 43% Thursday morning after the big card manufacturer reported financial results below its expectations. CPI said large issuers and …