Loyalty and rewards

Amazon’s incursion into brick and mortar has been aggressive, but not without its share of course corrections. The latest is a new round of price cuts at Whole Foods amid whispers of slow Prime traffic at the high-end grocer.

Under the hood of U.S. Bank's new mobile app; BofA, Wells Fargo sour on blockchain; are Fannie and Freddie too big?; and more from this week's most-read stories.

The U.K. prepaid gift card market is experiencing strong growth among consumers who buy them as gifts and for self-use, as well as among businesses that purchase them for customer loyalty programs and as employee incentives.

Beyond Apple’s glitzy product rollouts this week, the tech giant quietly notified users of new policies and a fee to Apple Pay Cash, the account in which the Apple Card deposits rewards.

A new feature from the microinvesting app Stash allows users to accumulate free stock in the companies where they spend money.

Traditional loyalty programs provide customers with tangible benefits, such as a free item with purchase or a reward for return visits. But these are limited in reach, argues James Roedding, vice president of product and data Rewards Network.

The new Apple Card wasn't just one product of many announced at the Steve Jobs Theater on Monday — it was the glue that binds all of Apple's new services together.

Agency concerned about the number of "risky" mortgages being approved; Brian Kelly, who runs The Points Guy website, can determine if a card succeeds or fails.

Blockchain technology provider Yosemite X is following the spirit of the mega-retailers' disbanded Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) joint retailer venture, but on a local level.

Attracting surprisingly technology-savvy older consumers is a lucrative—and surprisingly easy—goal for online retailers, as long as payments fraud protection is solid and understantable, argues Monica Eaton-Cardone, co-founder and CEO of Chargebacks911.