Marketing

Leading payment card processor First Data Corp. on Tuesday announced it had bought Perka Inc., a startup that provides smart-phone-based loyalty programs for merchants. The Perka buy comes just a few weeks after First Data unveiled a tablet-based point-of-sale system from Clover Network Inc., another startup that it quietly bought …

Social-media payments specialist Chirpify on Thursday introduced a service that lets marketers promote hashtags on a wide variety of media to solicit purchases. The so-called action tags can appear on TV or radio commercials, in print advertising, or on billboards and then be used on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, the …

Google Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new mobile app for its Google Wallet that emphasizes the wallet’s loyalty and person-to-person payments features that in the past had taken a back seat to its point-of-sale payment capability based on near-field communication (NFC) technology. The app is now available to all smart …

Investors may be disappointed with Apple Inc. in the wake of that tech giant’s introduction of two new iPhone models, but they’re plenty happy with digital wire-transfer company Xoom Corp. San Francisco-based Xoom on Tuesday raised $85.6 million in a new stock offering, about $20 million more than it expected …

Love your local vending machine and it’ll love you back. That’s the message from USA Technologies Inc. (USAT), operator of a wireless network of card-accepting vending machines. USAT this week unveiled a loyalty program called “More” centered around a proprietary, reloadable stored-value card that machine owners and operators can offer …

More than 18 months after acquiring Point, a Sweden-based provider of payment gateway solutions to merchants, point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. announced Monday that it will roll out the service to U.S. merchants beginning this fall. VeriFone intends to offer Point as a managed service through independent sales organizations …

Fresh from the launch of its GoBank mobile-banking product, Green Dot Corp. on Tuesday announced new marketing and distribution deals not only for GoBank but also for its core prepaid card program. Green Dot cards will be sold through 20,000 more retail stores, including locations belonging to Dollar Tree, Dollar …

Financial institutions wanting to expand the number of ATMs their customers can use in retail locations without those customers paying surcharges have a new option available under an approach announced late last week by Houston-based Cardtronics Inc. While Cardtronics has for years offered financial institutions the ability to put their …

  A little more than 90 days into its pilot, Isis, a mobile-payments consortium formed by wireless carriers Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, and T-Mobile USA, announced on Tuesday at the 2013 Payment Summit in Salt Lake City that it has more than 10,000 merchant locations in Salt Lake and Austin, …

While some big banks pull back on debit card promotion, smaller institutions are finding ways to boost usage among customers who have cards but seldom use them. And some are finding out that, perhaps because of the time of the year, charitable appeals may work better than personal rewards. Co-Op …