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Up against the rising success of social payments providers like Venmo and Square Cash, banks are deploying more options to keep themselves at the focus of digital payments.

Adyen has traditionally focused on streamlining card acceptance, processing and settlement for online payments, and now it wants control more of the merchant relationship by enabling merchants to issue virtual and physical payment cards.

Square Cash generates a lot of revenue – and the road to Square’s success is the Cash P2P app, along with Seller tools, as its two curated ecosystems that are cross-selling their way to profitability.

The Rakuten application has opened another front in the battle over nonfinancial companies' ownership of banks.

One more company has officially jumped on the free stock trading bandwagon. Over the next few weeks, Jack Dorsey’s Square Inc. will start allowing customers to buy and sells stocks for free on its cash payments app.

Merchants with multiple Square accounts will have a new app designed to help analyze business data and trends through Square's partnership with business management company Domo.

Small merchants often have to squeeze a hodgepodge of hardware onto their counters to manage government electronic benefit transfers, a distinct niche Novo Dia Group is working to solve with an investment from Square.

As fintechs like Stripe and Square close in on NCR's traditional businesses, the technology company is adding scale in southeastern markets through a purchase of Midwest POS Solutions.

Square has expanded its invite-only pilot for CBD products in the U.S. to all of its existing merchant accounts, but is charging a premium.

The major technology companies that have chipped away at incumbent payment businesses face much larger competition from this year’s big processing mergers, but they’ve also bulked up through fundraising and product development.

As incumbent merchant acquirers have gotten larger through massive M&A deals, Stripe has been bulking up as well, including a fresh investment to fuel a cross-border merchant technology stack.

To eke out growth in the mature payments terminal market, Square is taking its newest NFC-enabled hardware to markets outside the U.S. with heavy contactless card penetration, where some merchants are likely to be behind the technology curve.

Square is testing out a new Cash App feature that would enable users to make free stock trades, according to a video outlining the product’s features seen by Bloomberg.

Stripe is joining the throng of providers offering merchant loans based on payment receivables with Stripe Capital, a service for e-commerce companies already using Stripe for payments processing.

Under a state proposal, annual percentage rates would have to be disclosed on nonbank commercial loans of $500,000 or less. Lenders' responses have been mixed depending on their business model.

Square's working to boost its appeal to third-party developers, especially as a growing number of competitors and broader economic challenges loom on the horizon.

The company withdrew an earlier bid to become an ILC after regulators identified problems with its application. It is seeking a Nevada bank charter because it wants to add deposit management services and expand into small-business lending.

Square has launched Square Terminal in Canada in an effort to lure merchants that use myriad iPads, tablets and smartphones to receive payments in stores and remotely.

The Atlanta fintech, whose shares have plummeted since it went public last year, also said it will stop providing financial guidance to its investors.

Square has worked hard in the past several years to offer more than just mobile card acceptance, but not all of its efforts have paid off.