Merchant

The Plenti loyalty program unfolded two years ago with a new twist on plastic card-based rewards—a multi-merchant coalition in which participants were given exclusivity within their market and consumers could earn points at one retailer and redeem them at another.

American Banker readers share their views on the most pressing banking topics of the week. Comments are excerpted from reader response sections of AmericanBanker.com articles and our social media platforms.

The introduction of EMV is supposed to help reduce instances of fraud. But when a merchant has trouble operating its terminal, unscrupulous customers can take advantage.

Revel Systems is about to expand a program it’s created at several U.S. airports enabling shops and restaurants to seamlessly integrate business travelers’ checkouts with a mobile app from Expensify, a top corporate travel expense-reporting software provider.

Underbanked consumers will have an incentive to initiate mobile payments through PaySwag, an application that will issue rewards for using a smartphone to make a payment and allowing redemption at any time.

As many tech companies push to counter the use of cash in favor of cards and mobile wallets, some merchants are pushing back by urging the use of cash.

The mobile point of sale vendor ShopKeep has purchased ChowBot, an online order-and-pay software tool for restaurants, with plans to broadly integrate the new feature into its services for small businesses.

A lot of time can pass between a breach and when a company discovers the incident, creating an opportunity to damage payment systems.

The cuts punctuate the end to a rapid expansion period at the company, which now seems to be prioritizing profitability over growth.

Financial institutions see their best chance to repeal interchange debit fee caps, but merchants are confident they can prevent Congress from taking up the issue again.