Competitive Strategies

Few doubt the tremendous growth in mobile payments as consumers increasingly wield their mobile phones at the point of sale. In fact, consumers spent approximately $4 billion doing just that in 2014, a marked increase from the $961 million in 2013, says the “Mobile Proximity Payments Forecast 2015,” a new …

  Seemingly shunned by traditional lenders during the Great Recession a few years ago, small merchants turned to alternative financing to buy inventory and equipment. It’s a trend that shows few signs of dissipating. PayPal Inc. this week said it had lent $500 million in the first 18 months of …

Prepaid card issuer and services provider Green Dot Corp. lost considerable reload volume and revenues in the first quarter because of the discontinuance of its popular MoneyPak product, but the company late Thursday said its core businesses demonstrated good organic growth and recent acquisitions gave a big boost to the …

  Carrier billing as an e-commerce and mobile-commerce payment option is poised to expand significantly beyond the mobile phone realm when Microsoft Corp. releases Windows 10 later this year. And carrier-billing specialist Boku Inc. says direct carrier billing is a payment option for apps and digital content available from Google …

By Jim Daly Wire-transfer market leader The Western Union Co. issued a brief statement early Wednesday afternoon saying reports that it is in early talks to buy rival MoneyGram International Inc. “are not accurate.” The statement appeared to quickly deflate the two companies’ stock prices, especially MoneyGram’s, which had soared …

Independent sales organization Total Merchant Services Inc. hopes a newly altered agent-compensation plan will result in more merchants using EMV-compatible point-of-sale terminals. The U.S. payment card industry is migrating to EMV chip cards, requiring that merchants use compatible terminals. As a way to motivate its sales agents and get more …

The message about EMV and its payment-processing benefits is not sinking in with smaller merchants. That’s the assessment from Heartland Payment Systems Inc.’s chief executive Robert O. Carr, who says Heartland is responding by offering all-in-one security technology that includes but goes beyond EMV. “Well, resonating would be an overstatement,” …

Improving online conversion rates, especially for mobile commerce, depends on providing many options for faster checkout experiences. That’s the assertion of the newly released “Mobile Commerce Forecast 2015-2018” from Mark Beccue Consulting Inc. Beccue predicts that global mobile-commerce payment volume will grow from $187.5 billion in 2014 to $744 billion …

Brian V. Mooney, who on Tuesday took over as interim chief executive of the retailer-controlled Merchant Customer Exchange LLC payments consortium, brings strengths to the organization that could prove valuable when MCX at last launches its long-awaited CurrentC mobile-payments system, sources tell Digital Transactions News. And, by some accounts, he …

Transaction volumes, revenues and profits all headed up smartly for MasterCard Inc. in the first quarter. But MasterCard on Wednesday also reported laying out nearly $900 million in rebates and incentives during the quarter to build future volume in an increasingly competitive global card marketplace. In the United States, total …