Fast on the heels of Visa's enhanced partnership with PayPal, Mastercard announced its acquisition of UK-based VocaLink, a real-time payments platform. The move expands Mastercard's ecosystem beyond traditional card-based payments into market space occupied by the likes of PayPal and its Venmo direct payments platform. Mastercard points out that ACH-based transfers represent 50% of payments [...]
PayPal and Visa announced several new initiatives as part of a partnership deal aimed at thawing their historically frosty relationship. PayPal will de-emphasize its focus on steering customers to bank transfers instead of Visa cards to fund transactions, integrate Visa's mobile payments platform, provide more transaction data to card issuers, and allow Visa's debit cardholders [...]
In a move that could pose serious competitive challenges to PayPal and other ecommerce payment players, Apple is expanding Apple Pay to support web-based ecommerce payments starting this fall. The product will initially work only through Apple's Safari browser. 21 major retailers including Office Depot, Target, Home Shopping Network and Overstock.com have already indicated they [...]
PayPal is suspending its operations in Turkey after it was refused regulatory approval. Immediately after PayPal's announcement, competitor Stripe began an effort to sign up merchants who were orphaned by PayPal's decision. Apparently Stripe is pushing its "Atlas" program, which promises to establish a U.S. business entity for Turkish merchants for $500. But it isn't that [...]
At a recent JPMorgan tech conference, Visa's CEO Charlie Scharf basically admitted that Visa has a "love/hate" relationship with PayPal. I too admit, when I was running Discover's merchant network, I felt the same way. On one hand, PayPal generates substantial volume for the card networks, although it's not clear how much of that, if [...]
