Competitive Strategies

Nearly a year after announcing itself, Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) took another step toward achieving its goal of developing a cutting-edge mobile-payments system with the appointment of Dekkers L. Davidson as chief executive. Thursday’s announcement of Davidson, former managing director at credit card issuer Barclaycard U.S., as CEO comes hard …

PayPal Inc.’s point-of-sale initiative, which has seen the e-commerce processor penetrate thousands of stores while stirring controversy with at least some incumbent processors, will focus on achieving “ubiquity” and solving consumer “pain points” for the next several years, eBay Inc.’s chief executive said on Wednesday. The initiative, which began early …

In an effort to free up cash to rebuild its struggling business, payment processor First Data Corp. will stop funding its 24,000 employees’ retirement plans with cash and instead provide stock grants to all employees. New First Data chief executive Frank Bisignano announced the change Monday in a memo to …

As mobile-payments strategists struggle with clunky checkouts that lead to abandoned sales, a startup based in Albuquerque, N.M., is seeing dramatic early success with a 3-month-old solution that allows consumers to buy products from e-mail messages with a pair of clicks. The company, @Pay LLC, has signed up more than …

Intuit Inc.’s sale of its financial-services division, which it announced on Monday, will likely narrow the Mountain View, Calif.-based software giant’s focus in the electronic-payments business, leaving it with an established stake in merchant processing and mobile acceptance. Intuit agreed to sell the financial division to private-equity firm Thoma Bravo …

Sometimes news developments turn certain types of merchants into public-relations and political hot potatoes for their payment processors, forcing merchant acquirers to decide whether they want to continue serving them. Despite strong sales, firearms merchants are one such category today, thanks to several mass shootings in the past two years, …

PayPal Inc. this week struck a deal that offers the San Jose, Calif.-based processor the potential to reach TV viewers in more than 80 million U.S. households. The deal, with San Francisco-based commerce-platform vendor Delivery Agent Inc., furthers PayPal’s recent push into the nascent market for so-called T-Commerce transactions, or …

Mobile-payments processor Square Inc. on Wednesday moved to fill a gap in its product lineup by introducing Square Market, an e-commerce service for small U.S. merchants. Square Market publishes a merchant’s Web pages at no charge, doesn’t charge for listings, and charges a straight 2.75% of the sale for a …

  In the wake of recent top-level management changes, shareholders of leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. last week voted overwhelmingly against the company’s executive-compensation plan. While the ballot was advisory, observers say it is noteworthy because stockholders rarely reject the pay plans corporate boards of directors now present …

Announcing details for its “Cash for Registers” program, which it introduced a month ago, PayPal said it will waive processing fees on volume up to $20,000 a month through Jan. 31. The program officially gets under way July 10, which means early-bird merchants could get more than six months’ worth …