Competitive Strategies

Any bump up in an e-commerce site’s conversion rate could ripple through the merchant’s financial results. Processor Adyen NV hopes its new Personalize checkout service can aid these rates by enabling merchants to customize payment options for individual shoppers. Adyen says Personalize, a part of its Uplift payment optimization suite, …

Gaming-transactions specialist Pavilion Payments said it has agreed to acquire payments and automation contracts, along with technology assets, from DiTRONICS Financial Services, a funds-access platform serving casinos. Terms were not announced. Knot, an app linking consumers, merchants, and financial institutions, said it will work with Fiserv Inc. to enable Lyft drivers to more easily …

Illinois merchants scored a big victory late Tuesday in their battle for interchange relief as United States District Court Judge Virginia Kendall upheld the Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act. The decision, which comes after more than a year of legal wrangling, means the IFPA will go into effect July 1, …

Zelle, the peer-to-peer payment service from Early Warning Services LLC, says U.S. consumers sent more than $1.2 trillion in payments using the service in 2025, a 20% increase from 2024. Zelle first surpassed $1 trillion in 2024. That comes on 4.2 billion transactions, a 16% increase from 3.6 billion transactions …

Adyen NV announced Personalize, a tool that lets businesses modify checkout pages in real time in response to shopper preferences. The new service is related to Adyen Uplift, a routing capability launched last year and aimed at increasing conversion rates. Lut, a cannabis-payments specialist, said it will work with Frankenmuth Credit …

Toast Inc. announced early Tuesday it is partnering with online grocery-delivery and-pickup service Instacart to connect restaurants to the Instacart Marketplace, an aggregator of food and beverage suppliers. The move will enable food-and-beverage retailers on the Toast platform to align their product catalog with in-store stock and provide restaurants with …

Fiserv’s chief executive early Tuesday told Wall Street not to look for immediate improvement following a sub-par year in 2025. “Our headline results are below our expectations and will remain that way until mid-year,” chief executive Michael Lyons told equity analysts at the top of a group call with equity …

Block Inc.’s Square point-of-sale unit announced the launch of SquareAI in the United Kingdom. The technology, which Square says is free to merchants, offers conversational AI intended to help business owners interpret their data and arrive at decisions faster. Payments provider Blue Payment Agency Inc. expanded its focus to help e-commerce sites, especially those …

Artificial intelligence has long been a part of payments, known early on as machine learning, but now it’s shifting from a predictive function to agentic AI, where systems act, not just advise, said Joseph Arthur, managing partner at RPY Innovations, a payments consultancy. Speaking on a panel at the Northeast …