Alternative acquirers

Square's new card for business owners does something very bold with debit — and very troubling for banks.

Square just found a replacement for high-profile CFO Sarah Friar but is facing another big hole in its leadership team as head of payments Mary Kay Bowman leaves for Visa.

Ant Financial, Alibaba’s finance affiliate controlled by billionaire Jack Ma, agreed to buy a stake in the Brazilian payments firm StoneCo Ltd after the company prices its initial public offering, joining Warren Buffett in investing in Brazil’s booming financial-technology startup landscape.

Square’s growth strategy has always been to aim higher with products and services that benefit larger businesses than the ones it originally targeted with its mobile card reader. Its newest product diverges from that path.

For their own sake, GrubHub and Uber should have purchased Caviar when Square reportedly offered it to them for sale in 2016. Instead, they now have a competitor who’s looking to eat their lunch in the restaurant delivery business.

Pinduoduo's controversial IPO was seemingly a world removed from western merchant acquirers, but it's yet another example of how social payments can upend conventional relationships between merchants, shopping and payment processing.

Seeing an opportunity to address the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry’s needs for payments processings, Zodaka is launching with a system that focuses more on price than process.

The money flowing into alternative merchant acquiring is feeding an arms race, with each new deal adding pressure to become an automated one-stop shop for small businesses.

Merchant acquirers have moved mountains to embrace software and e-commerce over the old model of selling point of sale hardware, but there are signs that transformation is not enough to please investors.

Ingenico is negotiating a business combination with BS Payone that would boost its profile in parts of central Europe and allow it to counter multichannel moves by other major payment companies.