Competitive Strategies

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are shelling out ever more dollars to buy issuer loyalty and induce merchants to route transactions onto their networks. A Digital Transactions News analysis shows the two leading payment card networks are on track to spend approximately $6.75 billon on so-called rebates and incentives in …

Visa Inc. may be in the business of credit and debit cards, mobile wallets, tokenization, EMV chips and virtually anything involving electronic payments, but its latest financials tell the real story—it’s all about cash. On a day dominated by news of its pending $23 billion takeover of Visa Europe, Visa …

With two strokes of the pen, Merchant Customer Exchange LLC has addressed one glaring weakness in its mobile wallet. By announcing a deal this week with JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s brand-new Chase Pay mobile-payments service and two weeks ago with a little-known New York City-based app provider called BIM Networks …

Up to now, PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo payments service has been strictly a mobile person-to-person product appealing largely to twenty-somethings, but within a year users will be able to pay with Venmo at PayPal merchants if the parent company’s plan works out as expected. PayPal disclosed Wednesday in its quarterly …

Samsung Pay, the mobile-payments service from Samsung Electronics Co. Inc., has added 14 Visa-MasterCard payment card issuers. In addition, Verizon Wireless, the holdout mobile carrier that was absent from Samsung Pay’s launch a month ago, is now supporting the service, a Samsung executive said Wednesday. “We’re expanding our ecosystems,” Thomas …

  A new mobile-payments service that includes loyalty and rewards has launched with the goal of providing retailers with a single source of mobile engagement with their consumers. Dubbed OmnyPay, the service is just one of the many announcements made this week at the annual Money 20/20 conference in Las …

  ClearXchange, a bank-owned person-to-person payments company that launched a real-time payments service in June, says its merger with Early Warning Services LLC will assuage concerns about security as more consumers and financial institutions use the service. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Early Warning announced Monday it will buy San Francisco-based clearXchange for …

Known for its iPad-based point-of-sale system, Revel Systems said Friday it is making a mobile-commerce app available that merchants can use with their own brands. The app—available now for iOS and Android devices—enables merchants to more easily allow consumers to access product information, check loyalty data, place orders, and pay …

VeriFone Systems Inc. on Thursday introduced a new point-of-sale terminal product line that embraces design cues from consumer electronics. With the new terminal line, VeriFone also introduced its first app store. Dubbed Engage, the series of six devices, which includes two countertop terminals, two PIN pads, and two portable devices, …

For merchants these days, laying hands on a payment terminal with the needed EMV certifications is hard enough. Finding a certified device with built-in intelligence is even harder. Against that backdrop, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup called Poynt Co. on Thursday announced its Poynt Smart Terminal is the first such …