Marketing

In what may be a harbinger of things to come in mobile-payments pricing models, Boston-based LevelUp has dropped its merchant-acceptance fee from 2% of the transaction to zero. Instead, the company will earn merchant fees of 35 cents per dollar of incremental sales generated by the redemption of rewards earned …

Marketing revenue from mobile payments has the potential to dwarf payments revenue, as pundits have been saying for some time, but that potential will never be realized unless a new sort of payment network is built, argues a new report. Existing networks like Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., not to …

Nearly half of consumers are interested in using mobile wallets, and they are not necessarily wedded to wallet products from banks, according to research released on Monday. Indeed, some 48% of U.S. consumers surveyed online in April said they are interested in mobile wallets. Of these, 80% expressed a preference …

Just as payments executives were preparing to plunge into the Memorial Day holiday weekend, reports emerged that Groupon Inc. is testing a mobile-acceptance application in and around San Francisco. The reports, which are based in part on a solicitation received via e-mail by a merchant, indicate that the Chicago-based daily-deal …

Among five major financial products, only prepaid cards grew in consumer ownership last year, according to new findings from Javelin Strategy & Research. Pleasanton, Calif.-based Javelin assessed prepaid cards’ current market position and prospects through a random online survey last October of 3,210 U.S. adults, and compared many of the …

With rivals like PayPal Inc. and Square Inc. having made moves recently to enhance their point-of-sale payments offerings, Intuit Inc. on Tuesday confirmed it had bought AisleBuyer LLC, a 3-year-old startup whose technology lets consumers check themselves out of stores with their handsets. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, …

Groupon Inc.’s acquisition of a Web site that lets processors bid for merchant contracts represents a big opportunity for the online rewards giant but also underscores the dependence of such services on the merchant-acquiring business, a researcher who follows acquiring says. In the deal, announced on Friday, Groupon bought FeeFighters, …

As the prepaid card market matures, more data are emerging about surprising consumer behavior regarding prepaid cards or that challenge the conventional wisdom. For example, research commissioned by big processor First Data Corp., a major player in the prepaid space, found that given a choice between taking a gift or …

Experts may well have proclaimed 2012 to be the Year of Mobile Payments, what with digital wallets and other product introductions proliferating seemingly by the day, but at least some researchers are starting to ask a key question: Do consumers really want mobile payments? According to preliminary data, the answer …

With e-commerce kingpin PayPal Inc. having used mobile technology to move into processing for brick-and-mortar merchants, it was probably only a matter of time before others followed suit. The latest to join the parade is San Francisco-based mobile-payments provider Boku Inc., which on Thursday announced a platform that will let …