Acquirers

Royal Bank of Scotland and Mastercard are targeting value-added merchant services with a £60 million investment in London-based Pollinate Networks.

Two of Australia’s biggest banks, National Australia Bank (NAB) and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), are competing to be the first to commercially launch tap-on-phone contactless payments in the country.

In theory, the beauty of e-commerce is that a merchant can court any shopper in any part of the world with an internet connection. In practice, attracting a shopper and providing them with the customer experience they expect will look different in every country, says Lee Clifton of JP Morgan Merchant Services.

The year 2019 kicked off with a series of mutli-billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions designed to shake up the dynamics of the payments industry. While this was taking place, Elavon had its own plan for extending its influence through M&A.

The payments company has loaned $5.5 billion to 275,000 small businesses, thanks to a data-driven process free from human interaction.

The online platform lender Kabbage is making the move beyond just providing working capital loans to small businesses, putting it in direct competition with alternative acquirers and payment companies.

Merchants with multiple Square accounts will have a new app designed to help analyze business data and trends through Square's partnership with business management company Domo.

Now that the big, multi-billion dollar payment deals of the past year have closed, the companies must figure out how their new scale can address tasks such as software migrations or data sharing compliance in specific markets.

The major technology companies that have chipped away at incumbent payment businesses face much larger competition from this year’s big processing mergers, but they’ve also bulked up through fundraising and product development.

Emphasizing its expansion into multi-channel payments, Credorax is partnering with mobile point of sale developer BBPOS to provide mobile POS solutions for independent software vendors and sales organizations across Europe.