Competitive Strategies

• Starbucks Corp. said JPMorgan Chase & Co. by year’s end will issue a Visa-branded Starbucks reloadable prepaid card that will allow cardholders to earn Starbucks “stars,” or loyalty points, for purchases just about anywhere Visa is accepted; the new card is an extension of Starbucks’ relationship with JPMorgan Chase’s …

By John Stewart   These days, the airline and air-travel industry finds itself squeezed between two imperatives that have come into sharp focus in recent months. With high average tickets, airlines must guard against fraud at a time when the spread of EMV chip cards is pushing more criminals into …

By Eugene Rome   Merchant-service providers of all shapes and sizes learn the hard way that cutting corners by using cut-and-paste tactics to create a merchant agreement can end up in costly litigation. Independent sales organizations, third-party processors, and payment facilitators must have a merchant agreement that is tailored to …

Checkout abandonment, particularly on smart phones, remains high, suppressing transaction volumes and prompting new payment options to enable a faster, smoother process when consumers are ready to buy. BlueSnap Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based gateway, announced Tuesday an update to its Powered Buy Platform that aims to improve mobile and e-commerce …

While the U.S. market wrestles with its nearly 6-month-long transition to EMV chip cards and contactless payments based on near-field communication (NFC) technology, the rest of the world is surging ahead with contactless, online, and mobile transactions, according to the latest report from Juniper Research. Total digital payments worldwide will …

With President Obama in the midst of a historic trip to Cuba Monday, payments companies ranging from Stripe to PayPal to Western Union are eyeing new transaction growth as relations thaw between the U.S. and the island nation just 105 miles from Florida. Online payments provider Stripe Inc. announced that …

• NCR Corp. says its Epsilon payments application received EMV certification from First Data Corp., enabling the app to process credit and debit EMV transactions in its Radiant POS and StorePoint POS products. • Former Merchant Customer Exchange LLC chief executive Dekkers L. Davidson joined the InStream Inc. board of directors. …

Prepaid card provider Green Dot Corp. on Thursday announced a test with ride-sharing service Uber in which Uber drivers can be paid instantly via deposits into Green Dot’s subsidiary bank. Drivers for San Francisco-based Uber normally are paid once a week via direct deposit into financial accounts on file with …

Two mobile point-of-sale system providers are doing their part in the proliferation of such systems with the release of Click a Waiter Inc.’s white-label POS system and Aspex LLC’s deal with Frontier Airlines to provide an onboard POS system. Leominster, Mass.-based Click a Waiter Tuesday released a white-label version of …

First Data Corp. recently closed one office in Florida and plans to close a bigger one in New York next year, but the company still added 1,000 employees to its worldwide head count last year. Newsday, the newspaper of Long Island, N.Y., reported Tuesday that First Data filed a report …