Competitive Strategies

Visa Inc. announced multiple technological initiatives this week that aim to enhance the roles of artificial intelligence, stablecoins and tokens in payments, including usage of the ChatGPT AI program. The plethora of announcements came at the Visa Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco. “AI is transforming the front end of commerce,” Jack …

JetPay, a payments platform specializing in charter flights, has agreed to work with fiat and stablecoin payments platform Nuvion to speed cross-border payments for bookings. Xplor Technologies, a payments-technology provider, announced it has acquired Bitlancer, a developer of software for payroll and other functions aimed at fitness businesses. Bank of …

More than a year after Visa Inc. launched the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program, acquirers and their vendors are adapting to the new way of keeping tabs on fraud and chargeback levels. Known as VAMP, the program, according to Visa, consolidated five fraud and dispute programs and reduced 38 distinct remediation processes …

For the better part of two decades, I’ve watched the payments industry evolve from a straightforward utility into a labyrinth of technical complexity. Merchant fee structures today are no longer just the cost of doing business. They are a volatile variable that can quietly erode a company’s bottom line. As …

Mastercard announced Agent Pay for Machines, a system for the initiation, orchestration, and settlement of payments conducted at high speed between AI agents. The network is collaborating with more than 30 companies on the initiative, including Adyen, Global Payments, Stripe, and BVNK, a stablecoin platform it has agreed to acquire for $1.8 …

The payments platform Klarna AB may be a leading provider of buy now, pay later lending, but it is seeing increasing opportunity in other banking services. Early Tuesday, it launched savings accounts in the U.S. market. In its announcement, the company calls the move “a natural next step” following its …

Fraud-prevention specialist Feedzai announced Feedzai IQ Score, an AI-native scoring service to measure fraud risk for banks. Braid FI, which develops payments technologies for banks, announced an agreement with Koard, a specialist in in-person payments, to help financial institutions offer tap-to-pay capability on mobile phones. Xplor Pay, an embedded-payments technology provider, has …

A perpetual bane of payments, chargebacks create issues for merchants and their payment providers. Now, Findustry AI Inc. hopes its new artificial intelligence-enabled Chargeback Agent product will help ease the work of complying with card-brand dispute processes. Led by Jonathan Razi, who sold CardX, a surcharging-services provider, to Stax in 2021, …

The point-of-sale technology platform Valor PayTech announced early Friday an agreement with LANDI Global to represent LANDI’s line of point-of-sale devices in the U.S. market. The move is expected to lay the foundation for what Valor PayTech calls a “deeper product collaboration.” To start, Jericho, N.Y.-based Valor PayTech says it …

Imagine waving a wand and making something appear in your hands. While it’s not magic, the Cash App Wand could make that happen. Announced Thursday, Cash App Wand is the first in a series of Cash App Tags, which are NFC-enabled, physical payment accessories that let consumers pay without having …