Marketing

With a crucial deadline just five months away, the U.S. Department of the Treasury is blanketing the country this month with press releases urging recipients of Social Security and other benefits by check to adopt electronic payment. In the campaign, which started last week, the agency is sending out releases …

The obituaries for debit card rewards may be premature. Of the 100 largest issuers of debit cards ranked by debit purchase volume, 37 now offer a rewards program, down from 52 three years ago. But 19 issuers with $10 billion or more in assets still offer a program, despite a …

The crowded mobile-payments space for small merchants just got more cramped as daily-deal leader Groupon Inc. announced its new Groupon Payments service for merchants using Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPod touch devices to accept credit and debit cards. Groupon is coming in with low card-acceptance prices and aiming to leverage …

A 2-year-old startup that allows consumers to use prepaid cards augmented with funds from participating merchants is expected to launch its product commercially next week following a nearly nine-month pilot in the Bay area. Emeryville, Calif.-based Marqeta Inc., which has already signed up about 250 merchants, is banking on the …

Regardless of how talks between Google Inc. and American Express Co. turn out, it isn’t likely AmEx will shut down its cardholders’ access to the online search giant’s newly overhauled mobile wallet. Indeed, much of the discussion now is likely focused narrowly on the use of the AmEx brand, says …

Nearly half of U.S. smart-phone users, or more than 45 million people, tapped a shopping application in June, according to data released on Monday. The leading app was that of eBay Inc., which attracted almost 13.2 million unique users, according to the data from New York City-based researcher The Nielsen …

With the influence of smart phones on in-store sales outpacing their influence on online sales, San Francisco-based Zappli Inc. is seeking to remedy that disparity through the introduction of InstaBuy, a mobile-checkout application that enables consumers to make a purchase through their smart phone in two clicks. Merchants can deploy …

National Payment Card Association is out to prove the obituaries for decoupled debit were, as the saying goes, exaggerated. Not only does the company have 4,000 gas stations accepting its PIN-based debit cards, it expects a major petroleum vendor will begin accepting debit transactions through its platform on a mobile …

Hard on the heels of its announcement last week that it is now processing for some 2 million merchants and individuals, mobile-acceptance startup Square Inc. on Tuesday said it has added customer-loyalty functions to its Pay with Square and Square Register applications. The new functions will allow both merchants and …

The music and movie industries as well as retailers are next on startup Dynamics Inc.’s list of targeted industries for its ePlate loyalty application. Launched in April, ePlate embeds computer architecture into a credit card, enabling consumers to rewrite information from a choice of loyalty programs to the card’s magnetic …