Acquirers

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.

JCB International has entered an acquiring partnership with Riyad Bank to enable acceptance of JCB cards at merchant terminals and ATMs throughout Saudi Arabia.

Several large mobile point of sale projects are hitting the market at once to reach financially troubled retailers, with JPMorgan Chase making use of a three-year-old acquisition to push back against the technology firms that have been gobbling up small-business clients.

MagicCube has launched i-Accept, a software-based replacement for traditional terminals, allowing acquiring banks and financial services providers to offer merchants an option for contactless and PIN payment acceptance through Android devices.

Longtime finance entrepreneur Jackie Reses, who led Square Capital for the last five years, is leaving the company at the end of the month. Square has not yet named a successor.

Square is moving to help minority and underserved groups by investing $100 million in nonprofit financial institutions and Black-owned businesses.

London-based Rapyd has added Mastercard and Visa acceptance to its European payments platform to help merchants take advantage of retail’s shift to online.

Square is entering the earned wage access (EWA) fray, but it’s taking a tailored approach that aims to drive transaction volume within its Cash App.

FIS' purchase of Worldpay in 2019 required Ellyn Raftery, the company's chief marketing and communication's officer, to reshape its brand to showcase the strengths of both companies — all while a major global pandemic hastened her timeline.

If the mega payments deals of 2019 left the acquiring landscape somewhat scorched, the COVID-19 pandemic planted new seeds to allow ISOs to grow by quickly converting merchants to electronic payments.

Advocates of allowing merchants to add a surcharge to defray the cost of credit card interchange have had to overcome network bureaucracy, state laws and even ingrained habits among the merchants themselves.