Merchant

JPMorgan Chase has made several investments in financial technology startups, but its plan to buy WePay will give its 4 million small-business clients a much more direct way to adopt digital payments.

TD Bank has pledged $3 million to provide credit counseling to small-business owners. The hope is that those owners will use commercial loans to replace personal credit cards and home equity as their primary forms of business funding.

UL Transaction Security has teamed up with Zurich-based payment software engineering firm Abrantix to create a robot to automate the typically tedious, manual process of payment terminal testing.

You can’t just turn the computers off and shut your door, nor can you rely on outdated, traditional training methods to prepare your team for a landscape of threats and continuously evolve, writes Laura Lee, executive vice president of cyber training and assessments at the Circadence Corporation.

Consumers now expect money to move at web speed, be instantly available, and safe to spend, writes Drew Edwards, CEO of Ingo Money.

In a surprise move, the Supreme Court will decide whether Amex may bar merchants from steering customers to less expensive card networks. The card issuer will have to prove the consumer gain from its practices outweighs the merchant pain.

The U.S. Supreme Court accepted a case that could roil the credit-card business, agreeing to consider reviving government allegations that American Express Co. thwarts competition by prohibiting merchants from steering customers to cards with lower fees.

The ROI with the incremental costs and considerations will determine whether to proceed or not whether it is cashless, cash, or other alternative payment methods, writes Laura Townsend, senior vice president of the Merchant Advisory Group.

Efforts to make it easier for small businesses to apply for SBA loans, coupled with key community banks' outreach initiatives, contributed to the third consecutive record for 7(a) lending, but credit union participation is still lagging.

The convenience of receiving payments within seconds, with the minimal transaction fees that bitcoin provides, means a lot to a business, writes Mariam Nishanian from Dentacoin.