Payments

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 saw some businesses become big winners — such as Zoom, Home Depot and payments companies like PayPal — while other businesses suffered heavily, most notably the travel and hospitality industries. Credit card issuers also suffered, as demand lagged heavily for new cards and their overall spending dropped considerably during the year.

PayPal Holdings closed an account held by Joy In Liberty, one of the groups that paid for supporters of President Donald Trump to travel to Washington, where mobs stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

Preparing to expand its B2B e-commerce offerings in North America, Fortis Payment Systems LLC has acquired technology integrator Swype at Work and entered a long-term partnership with Swype affiliate Net at Work.

American Express has spent years refining a decision-making engine that can tailor products and services to cardholders' needs in real time.

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.

PayPal’s Venmo has launched a new “Cash a Check” feature on its mobile app to some customers. The offering is made in partnership with Ingo Money and its parent, First Century Bank.

The events of 2020 fueled new customer expectations, accelerated digital transformation and allowed B2B companies to react and deliver. But customers’ changing expectations are not going to disappear, says MSTS' Brandon Spear.

Finance teams can cut down their workload significantly and free up time to analyze data and make more strategic decisions towards improving customer experience and business growth, says RecVue's Amit Chaudhry.

The motivation behind JPMorgan Chase's purchase of rewards company cxLoyalty is clear — travel spending and rewards have suffered greatly during the pandemic — but another problem Chase is tackling with this acquisition is the need to wean people off cash rewards.

Michael Moeser, senior analyst at PaymentsSource, talks to Jennifer Philo, group vice president of U.S. commerce at Blackhawk Network, about the ways the global pandemic has transformed the use cases for gift cards, prepaid cards and loyalty products the company supports.