Competitive Strategies

With financial institutions lending less to small businesses, new, technology-based companies are moving into merchant lending to fill the void. This is a market typically served by so-called merchant cash-advance firms, companies that lend money in the form of advances against a merchant’s expected credit card volume. In many cases, …

Count Poynt Co. as the newest member of the point-of-sale terminal maker industry. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company hopes to entice merchants, developers, and resellers to its product. Osama Bedier, Poynt chief executive, formerly led Google Inc.’s Google Wallet and before that worked at PayPal Inc. The L-shaped device rests on …

  While Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay mobile wallet has been grabbing the headlines, the telco-controlled Softcard mobile-payments service this week lined up another major fast-food chain. Consumers now can use their Softcard mobile wallets to pay for purchases at U.S. McDonald’s locations. Formerly known as Isis, Softcard is a smart …

By Jim Daly Attempting to do damage control in the wake of an email hack and unfavorable publicity about retailers who want to accept other mobile wallets, the chief executive of the retailer-sponsored Merchant Customer Exchange LLC (MCX) mobile-payments service said Wednesday that MCX is working with general-purpose credit card …

Stressing new services such as tokenization, online checkout, and mobile payments, Visa Inc. chief executive Charles W. Scharf on Wednesday left no doubt where the sprawling card network’s future lies. “The things we are doing are all about having the best products in the market to capture where the growth …

For the past decade, image exchange has been one of the undisputed success stories of electronic payments—so much so, in fact, that nearly all banking and retail executives take it for granted that paper checks will clear as images and funds will likely settle the same or next day. But …

The effort to bring faster payment settlement to the United States gained momentum this week with an announcement by The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC that it plans to build what it calls a “real-time payment system.” The New York City-based organization, which is owned by the largest financial institutions …

  Two payment-services companies have separately introduced services designed to make it easier for merchants and consumers to engage in e-commerce and mobile commerce. Payments-and-authentication-services provider Jumio Inc.’s newest service aims to make it easier for consumers to shop using smart phones and tablets. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Jumio says its …

By Rick Oglesby, Double Diamond Payments Research With Apple Pay now confirmed to launch on Monday, we are closer to seeing the impact it will have on mobile-payments acceptance, technologies, and standards. In the meantime, much of the debate concerning Apple Inc.’s payments venture has missed a crucial point. While …

American Express Co. is making it easier for its cardholders to use their points to buy a Big Mac sandwich at McDonald’s restaurants in the United States. The card issuer announced Tuesday that AmEx rewards points now can be used to pay for purchases at select McDonald’s locations with national …