Acquirers

Apple's planned update for accepting contactless payments on its handsets is as disruptive as it is inevitable. Companies like Ingenico, which makes point-of-sale hardware, have strategies in place to build on the tech giant's platform without sidelining their own devices.

Tap to Pay on iPhone turns any of the tech giant's recent smartphones into a card reader, but since Apple doesn't provide its own merchant services, it stops short of becoming a direct threat to acquirers and payment facilitators.

The move could impact payments providers that rely on Apple’s iPhones to facilitate sales, such as Block’s Square, which dominates the market.

JPMorgan Chase's recent purchase of a stake in the Greek fintech will allow the U.S. company to offer new services like merchant credit in Europe, where it is No. 5 among merchant acquirers.

By acquiring First Sound Bank in Seattle, the fintech would control the strategic direction of the combined company and won't have to share revenue, CEO Luvleen Sidhu says.

As payments steadily migrate to cloud-based, digital channels with the rise of mobile e-commerce, Intuit’s QuickBooks unit is augmenting its online payment acceptance options with a mobile payment device that links to its accounting software.

As stores that went online-only start to reopen their physical locations, JPMorgan Chase is looking to bolster its position among European merchants by adding software from ACI Worldwide that's designed to support payments across multiple channels.

FIS is planning to follow the integration of its Worldpay acquisition by adding hundreds of new sales people to bring the combined companies' technology to a wider market.

Fattmerchant is capitalizing on the subscription concept by taking a majority stake in Canadian billing software firm Fusebill, which competes with Chargebee and Chargify in the fast-growing arena of managing subscription revenue for merchants.

Newer partners like the Isreali fintech First are building connections to help stores enroll.

The arrangement, which focuses on merchant services, comes about six months after Global Payments secured a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services on the issuer side of its business.

What started as Mezu and went through 18 difficult months competing as a payments offering has now rebranded as Alviere, with a broader range of digital banking services.

Even early in the pandemic, it was apparent that acquirers needed digital onboarding, electronic payments and automated chargeback solutions to keep their footing in an acquiring landscape already facing disruption.

Square Inc., the digital-payment company run by Jack Dorsey, has held talks to acquire the music-streaming service Tidal as part of a push to diversify, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Ultimately, whatever options banks and fintechs deliver for this next phase of the pandemic must appease not only the merchants but their customers as well.

Cross-border online payment service provider PrimeiroPay is partnering with Visa payment management platform CyberSource to open high-growth Latin America markets to merchants seeking access to those regions.

Stripe’s technology, which enables millions of merchants to easily accept payments online, also provides a window into the broader money-management pain points of the businesses it serves — and it is through this window that Stripe sees a path for growth.

Moscow-based JSC Post Bank has established a merchant acquiring agreement with JCB International to allow JCB cardholders to withdraw cash from all of the bank's ATMs and make payments at Post Bank point-of-sale terminals in Russia.

Crypto played a key role in Square's 140% year-over-year growth in revenue for the third quarter — and 212% growth in gross profit for the Cash App alone.

Mastercard has rolled out a set of AI-powered tools to thwart fraud and data breaches across banks' ecosystems, particularly to benefit acquirers’ online merchants.