Competitive Strategies

In 2015, American Express Co. had a bad year. Hit hard by competitive pressures on merchant fees and cobrand-card returns, as well as swooning gasoline prices, the big card network on Thursday reported a 4% decline in revenue net of interest expense for the year to $32.8 billion, its first …

Subscription payments, also known as recurring billing, is getting renewed attention in the payments industry from companies that provide direct-to-consumer services merchants use, like Recurly Inc., and some providing merchant services, like Fattmerchant Inc. Merchants selling goods and services paid for with subscription payments likely had a busy Cyber Monday …

While consumer acceptance of mobile wallets has been painfully slow for wallet developers such as Apple Inc., new survey results from the nation’s largest mobile carrier show consumers are quite willing to use mobile apps in some form to buy things. Some 23% of smart-phone owners last year used an …

With the National Retail Federation’s annual trade show kicking off Monday in New York City, a number of payments companies tried to get a head start on the show by releasing news over the weekend. Much of it concerns developments for the physical point of sale. Here’s a wrap-up of …

Samsung Pay, the mobile wallet that uses near-field communication (NFC) and magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology, is developing a set of simple tools merchants can use to create offers and manage loyalty programs. The tools should be available this year. That’s the word from Will Graylin, global co-general manager of …

Sweden’s online-payments firm Klarna started operations in the United States only four months ago, but already it is making itself felt in the highly competitive business of serving U.S. e-commerce merchants. Nearly 20 retailers have signed up for the company’s streamlined checkout service, including big sellers Overstock.com and Shoes.com. That’s …

Toronto-based loyalty-services and payments start-up nanoPay Corp. has acquired the MintChip digital-currency platform from the Royal Canadian Mint, the organizations announced Tuesday. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed, but nanoPay says it could be revealed at a later date. MintChip gained fame in 2012, just as Bitcoin and other virtual currencies …

Consumers using mobile-banking sites or apps make only sporadic use of their ability to pay bills, send money to other individuals, or load a prepaid card, finds new research from Javelin LLC, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based payments-research firm. In the “2015 Mobile Banking, Smartphone, and Tablet Forecast” released Tuesday, Javelin found …

The more than 72,000 students and faculty members of Arizona State University have a new app to help them find deals from local merchants. Dubbed ASU Deals, the app, available for iOS and Android mobile devices, enables users to search for local deals and receive notifications from merchants. Developed by …

The crucial role in-app payment plays in mobile-wallet usage emerged in high relief Monday in a report showing that almost one-third of all Apple Pay credit card transactions made in the last five months by surveyed consumers occurred within a merchant app rather than in a store. Over the same …