Competitive Strategies

By John Stewart Just within the past year or so, tokenization has assumed a central role in digital payments, and in that business three major card networks are the dominant—indeed, only—players performing a crucial function known as the token service provider. But this new form of payment processing is moving …

Visa Inc. is providing emerging self-checkout provider Digital Retail Apps another venue to showcase its smart phone-based service by enabling it at the Visa Innovation Center, its technology lab in San Francisco. Toronto-based Digital Retail Apps says Visa will integrate the SelfPay technology into the Visa Everywhere Shop app, enabling …

Retailers’ increasing attention to making the checkout process a smooth and speedy one could potentially enhance the volume of mobile-commerce payments. One vendor trying to reform the checkout process is Moovweb, a San Francisco-based e-commerce platform provider. On Monday, it launched MoovCheckout, a service that helps retailers better manage their …

ATM surcharges rose 4% to an average of $2.88 this year from $2.77 in 2014, while foreign fees increased 3.8% to $1.64 from last year’s $1.58, Bankrate Inc. found in its latest annual study of checking account fees. Together, the two fees total $4.52, another new record and up 3.9% …

By John Stewart Payments-processing titan First Data Corp. on Thursday launched its long-awaited effort to go public with an initial offering of stock that would value the company at as much as $17.6 billion and raise as much as $3.2 billion. The IPO could well be the largest seen on …

  Samsung Electronics America Inc.’s launch today of Samsung Pay, a mobile-payments service exclusive to its smart phones, could pose a quandary for consumers over whether they should choose Samsung Pay or Android Pay, Google Inc.’s mobile-payment service that wireless operators are loading onto the Android phones they sell. Samsung …

By John Stewart Mobile payments have invaded many areas of consumer commerce, and now they’re about to show up in sit-down restaurants. Dallas-based Ziosk LLC said late last week it will add capability for Apple Pay and Android Pay acceptance to its custom-built Ziosk tabletop tablet starting early next year. …

By John Stewart At least some consumers in Columbus, Ohio, are using the Merchant Customer Exchange’s CurrentC mobile-payments app, but with little or no advertising so far finding a store cashier who knows about the app and how it works is a hit-or-miss proposition. That’s the finding of a CurrentC …

Heeding a call among businesses for faster and cheaper payments, payments provider Payment Data Systems Inc. has released the Stream general-purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid card to make it easier for companies to send funds, like commissions or rewards, to contractors or customers. The card, which bears a MasterCard Inc. brand, …

By John Stewart While some startup transaction processors have capitalized lately on the idea of so-called free processing, at least one has now decided to backtrack on that concept. BitPay Inc., an Atlanta-based processor of Bitcoin transactions for merchants, announced Wednesday it is scrapping a plan it introduced only 14 …