Competitive Strategies

With the April 18 tax-filing deadline bearing down, a new cash-payment option from the Internal Revenue Service and payment processors PayNearMe and Official Payments lets consumers pay federal income taxes in cash at 7-Eleven convenience stores—and if there’s any money left, they can ease the pain with a Slurpee. PayNearMe, …

•  PayPal Holdings Inc. will not follow through on plans announced two weeks ago to expand in Charlotte, N.C., and add 400 jobs because of North Carolina’s recently enacted House Bill 2, which PayPal says “perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of …

Automated clearing house governing body NACHA says nearly all of the nation’s biggest financial institutions plan to originate same-day ACH payments this year. The January-February telephone survey of executives at 22 of the nation’s top 25 ACH originators found that 95%, which works out to all but one of the …

E-retailing giant Amazon.com Inc. unveiled an e-commerce developer program Monday designed to spread Amazon’s payments service across more shopping sites. Dubbed the Amazon Payments Partner Program, the invitation-only program targets e-commerce developers and platform providers to help them add a pay or Amazon log-in button to their checkout pages. Already, …

• VeriFone Systems Inc. introduced Verifone Carbon, a black, portable point-of-sale system for café owners, quick-service restaurants, and stores that features a tablet screen for the merchant and a smaller screen for the customer, and a stand with a built-in printer. The Intel-powered device includes VeriFone’s cloud-based Commerce Platform that …

Do competing acquirers run a significant risk if they ignore the way Square Inc. operates? Some experts are now saying they do, though you wouldn’t think so in the light of recent events. When 6-year-old Square went public in November, the result was bloody. On the first day of trading, …

The U.S. payments industry is keeping a watchful eye on friendly-fraud chargebacks now that the EMV liability shift is in effect. According to software enterprise CA Technologies, global card-not-present fraud by 2018 will be at least double the $2.9 billion logged in 2014. Fraudulent chargebacks, always a risk for sellers, …

Contrary to what many may suspect, price is not the top reason retailers switch from one point-of-sale provider to another, according to a study from Capterra Inc., a business-software review site. In a survey of more than 400 merchants, 34% cited a POS system’s lack of necessary features as the …

• Braintree launched Braintree Auth as an invitation-only service in beta. The service streamlines integration of Braintree merchants with e-commerce platforms and eases the way for new payment methods enabled by Braintree, a unit of PayPal Holdings Inc. Braintree Auth currently processes payments on e-commerce platforms Bigcommerce, WooCommerce, and 3DCart. …

• The Federal Reserve picked consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to support its Faster Payments Task Force efforts this year by assessing solution proposals from various payments providers. • Merchant processor Square Inc. announced its “Build With Square,” a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrates point-of-sale and-online payments capabilities with …