Mobile point-of-sale

For several years, PayPal, Square, Adyen and Stripe have dominated the lucrative payments market. Now hundreds of upstarts with names like Bolt, Toast and Due are muscling into the market with their own twist on facilitating commerce between merchants and shoppers.

Square Inc. named Activision Blizzard Inc. executive Amrita Ahuja as chief financial officer, replacing Sarah Friar, who stepped down from her role as Jack Dorsey’s No. 2 at the digital-payments company last month.

Despite years of advancements in mobile and online payments, the physical point of sale remains still ripe for disruption.

It's commonly thought that retailers are loath to upgrade the point of sale as the holidays approach, since they don't want to introduce any variables that could lead to lost sales.

The payment terminal maker Poynt, a rival to Square and other hardware providers with customized software applications for merchants, has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round with strategic partners Elavon and National Australia Bank.

As companies mature out of their startup phase, their sales growth curves begin to flatten and costs start to rise — unless, of course, they change their business model. And that’s exactly what Square is doing to maintain its startup-style growth.

Square gave an earnings forecast in the current quarter that missed analysts’ estimates, amid increasing spending on new products beyond its central payments processing business. The profit projection outweighed a strong sales outlook, sending shares down in extended trading.

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.

The fintech wave has nearly devoured the entire point of sale industry, as lone major holdout Ingenico weighs an unsolicited bid from an investment bank’s payments group.

The payments industry stood out as an active market for mergers and acquisitions during the first three quarters of 2018 with a 33 percent increase in transactions over the same period last year.

Square CFO Sarah Friar, who helped lead the company's many forays into financial services, is leaving Square to become CEO of Nextdoor, a social network for local neighborhoods.

At Tropical Smoothie, a new IT project will deploy new cloud-hosted point of sale terminals, handheld devices and kitchen display systems over the next few weeks across its 700-location footprint.

The technology arms race among payment fintechs is converging on the market for credit and loans, with Square rolling out an installment payment option for consumers that complements its merchant capital option for sellers.

Square Inc. is offering loans to customers to pay for goods and services from merchants that use its payments platform, another move by the company to push deeper into financial services.

Square’s online payments APIs and Square Invoices are adding support for Google Pay, which the mobile point of sale company hopes will streamline checkout for online stores and websites.

Stripe is making a Stripe Terminal available to its e-commerce clients, looking to unify online and physical point of sale payment streams.

The Lightning Connector eliminates the need for merchants using the Square Reader to rely on a 3.5mm headphone jack of a smartphone or tablet to operate with its mobile app.

Everything's in place for mobile payments to supplant plastic cards in the U.S. — except for a compelling reason for the transition.

After researchers exposed how hackable mobile point of sale systems are, vendors quickly shored up their defenses — while also blaming some vulnerabilities on payment methods they characterize as outdated.