Merchant

Square Inc.’s lending business is booming, but Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said that rather than competing with banks, his company is focused on offering traditional banking services to more merchants and consumers who might not have easy access to them.

The online lending platform Kabbage announced Thursday it has raised $250 million from the Japanese telecom giant SoftBank, marking its largest equity fundraising round to date.

Shopping and paying for goods with a smartphone or tablet has been a staple of modern consumerism for years, but mobile wallet adoption is just at its early stages, writes Lisa Stanton, president of InAuth.

Enticements such as rewards, loyalty points and coupons seldom face pushback as a marketing concept, but there's been recent concern that these programs are devouring potential revenue from consumers who would be willing to pay full price.

Not long ago, self-checkout lanes were seen as an encroachment on traditional retail sales, depriving shoppers of the personal touch that comes with interacting with a cashier. Today, this model is under attack from mobile devices, which are both more high-tech and more personal.

Toronto-based Glance Technologies has introduced a new version of its Glance Pay mobile payments app that uses micro-location sensing technologies along with image recognition, an approach it says is easier for merchants to adopt than QR codes.

In recent years, companies have aggressively reinvented the card-reading dongle to fit their brands and absorb new technologies like EMV and NFC. But few have succeeded in doing away with the dongle entirely.

As a large furniture retailer in South Florida, City Furniture had to decide whether to move quickly to upgrade terminals and avoid the October 2015 EMV chip card liability shift, or stay on track with a process it was already engaged in for a mobile point of sale system in its showrooms.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit and blogs create environments where like-minded users can connect, share opinions and cultivate a sense of camaraderie, creating an unprecedented number of distinct nano-segments, writes Steve Gilde, director of global payments for Paragon.

Shopify is working to encourage more physical sales for merchants that don't have physical stores.