A collection of our most popular payments insights
As the year begins to wind down, we thought you might enjoy a round-up of some of the hottest payments content TSG has released in 2021. Visit the collection →
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The Strawhecker Group (TSG), the largest analytics and consulting firm focused on the payments acceptance industry, is proud to announce that Clover® from Fiserv has won the 2021 Restaurant Smart Terminal Provider of the Year award, followed by North American Bancard's Payanywhere in second place.
“Today, restaurateurs are seeking flexible payment services that offer tight integration with the key software tools they need to operate their business now, and in the future,” said Jared Drieling, Senior Director of Market Intelligence and Insights. “We are excited to honor Clover as Restaurant Provider of the year, and to commend North American Bancard, both companies have demonstrated their commitment to delivering innovation to benefit restaurants.”
TSG’s Market Intelligence team can help POS providers assess and benchmark solutions. For more information contact TSG.
H&R Block filed a trademark infringement lawsuit over Square’s new name, “Block” on Thursday. The tax preparation service seeks to keep Block from using the new name, saying in a press release that the fintech company “would improperly capitalize on the goodwill and consumer trust cultivated by Block since 1955.” H&R Block said the renamed company competes with it directly in financial services, including through its recent acquisition of Credit Karma Tax for tax preparation. It alleged the name would be overly confusing for consumers, especially given the two companies’ overlapping offerings.
Regulators in Washington may crack down on the industry behind "buy now, pay later," the increasingly popular method for consumers to purchase things online. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Thursday that it is looking to "collect information on the risks and benefits of these fast-growing loans" from five leading BNPL companies: Affirm; Australia's Afterpay, which is getting bought by Square owner Block; PayPal; privately held Swedish fintech Klarna; and Zip, another BNPL firm headquartered in Australia.
Celero Commerce (“Celero”) announced the acquisition of Everest Payment Solutions (“Everest”) a national provider of payment processing services. With the addition of Florida-based Everest, Celero, a top ten non-bank payment processor in the United States, will serve over 45,000 merchants processing more than $18 billion in annual card volume. “We are excited to join the Celero Commerce family,” said Marty Friend, President, and co-founder of Everest. “We share Celero’s high-tech, high-touch approach to the industry."
Halfway through December, holiday shopping is kicking into high gear as shoppers continue to return to retailers – both online and in person – in droves. While every year sees crowds of last-minute shoppers, this year, despite concerns around the economy and COVID-19, it’s clear that consumers are still spending their hard earned cash to secure presents under the tree. Between November 24 and December 8, 2021, sales at Square US retailers increased 21% over 2020 sales (which had increased 15% over the same period from 2019 to 2020).
A new survey from Klarna reveals that many consumers have not yet even come close to finishing their holiday shopping. Results from the survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adult consumers conducted by the global payments provider and shopping platform indicate that about nine in 10 (89%) respondents haven’t finished their holiday shopping yet, up 39% from the 64% of respondents who were not finished by this point in the 2020 holiday season.
The world’s banking giants may or may not adopt cryptocurrencies at some point, but they are clearly looking to adopt the distributed-ledger technology that undergirds digital money. In the latest such move, Wells Fargo & Co. and HSBC Bank plc early Monday announced they have agreed to process cross-border transactions between the two big banks on a shared blockchain. To start with, the technology will support transfers in U.S. dollars, the euro, the Canadian dollar, and the British pound sterling, but the banks say they plan to process more national currencies soon.
The busiest days of the holiday shopping season may be over, but some young consumers have yet to pay their dues to the likes of Klarna and Afterpay. The wildly popular buy now-pay later services were the go-to payment option for about 1 in 5 holiday shoppers — 22% of which were Gen Zers, according to NerdWallet. In a separate Piplsay survey of Gen Z respondents who've used BNPL, 43% said they missed at least one BNPL payment this past year, compared to just 31% of millennials, that October report showed.
Meet Topi, a Berlin-based startup that raised a $4.5 million pre-seed funding round co-led by Index Ventures and Creandum. The company is working on a payment solution that is both fast and capital-efficient for businesses. On the B2C front, consumer payments have evolved at a rapid pace over the last few years. When it’s time to check out, customers expect to be able to choose between several payment methods that all offer different advantages and drawbacks.
May require account to read. Bitcoin and other novel “tokenized” assets—so called because ownership is documented as a unique digital token on a ledger such as blockchain—recently reached more than $3 trillion in total value. The race is now on to tokenize all types of assets. Embodying ownership, rights and obligations in blockchain-based tokens is in many ways superior to our legacy financial infrastructure. Tens of billions of dollars of tokenized assets change hands daily on markets that operate seamlessly around the clock. The nascent cryptocurrency market is the tip of the financial-information technology iceberg.
Remember dogecoin? The meme-inspired cryptocurrency skyrocketed as much as 23% on Tuesday after Elon Musk said Tesla would accept dogecoin as payment for some of its merchandise. It last traded 18.9% higher. “Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes,” the electric auto maker’s CEO said in a tweet. Musk has frequently talked up dogecoin, calling it his favorite digital coin and mentioning it in an appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
Silverflow, a modern global payment technology company, raises a $17M Series A led by Coatue Management. Previous investors Crane Venture Partners and INKEF Capital also participated in the round, along with Global Paytech Ventures and angel investors Jason Gardner, Founder and CEO of Marqeta, and Gokul Rajaram, a former Square product lead and current Coinbase board member. The investment will be used to grow the team from 24 to 70 people over the next two years, expand into the US, and strengthen the company’s balance sheet.
May require account to read. Citigroup and Macy’s renewed their longtime credit card partnership after the two spent months renegotiating the terms of the agreement. As part of the deal, Citigroup will continue to provide payment offerings for the retailer’s Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s brands through March 2030, the companies said Monday in a statement. “We’re so pleased to announce a multiyear extension of our 16+-year credit-card program with Macy’s,” David Chubak, head of Citi’s retail-services business, said in the statement.
One comparison I’ve heard repeatedly over the last year is that buying NFTs to “flex” on people in the metaverse is just like collecting sneakers, and now Nike is apparently trying to make sure it’s ready for the literal version of that possibility. The apparel giant just announced the acquisition of RTFKT Studios, which it calls “a leading brand that leverages cutting edge innovation to deliver next generation collectibles that merge culture and gaming.”
Costco Wholesale Corp. last Thursday reported first-quarter profit and revenue that beat Wall Street expectations, as executives said the company is weathering supply-chain issues and inflationary pressures better than other retailers. “We’ve ordered earlier in many cases given the longer lead times,” said Richard Galanti, Costco’s chief financial officer, during the company’s earnings call. “We feel pretty good about staying in stock and mitigating price increases as best we can.”
Through its new Holiday Hub on the Uber Eats platform, the rideshare and delivery provider will offer on-demand delivery and pickup of Christmas trees, wreaths and seasonal essentials to customers in limited markets. Trees are available in Los Angeles, San Diego and West Palm Beach, Florida, while New York customers can order wreaths for delivery. The Holiday Shop, available on the Uber Eats app, is through a partnership with Proper Companies’ holiday division, which includes Mr. Jingles Christmas Trees and Mr. Jack O' Lanterns Pumpkin Patch.
Rising prices on gas and groceries are prompting Americans to pull back in other areas, raising fears that lingering inflation — coupled with a new covid wave — could be slowing economic growth. Retail sales edged up 0.3 percent in November from the month before, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday, well below the 0.8 percent gain forecast by economists. It’s also a significant slowdown from the 1.7 percent spike recorded in October, when many Americans began their holiday spending in earnest.
More than 148 million consumers plan to shop in-store and online on the last Saturday before Christmas this year, according to the annual survey released today by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics. The number reflects a slight drop from last year when 150 million consumers were expected to shop but an increase from the 147 million expected shoppers in 2019. “Retailers began preparations for the holiday season months in advance, offering seasonal inventory early and taking preventative measures to circumvent supply chain challenges exacerbated by the pandemic,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said.
Count former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios among the experts who sees brighter days ahead for the U.S. economy. If she’s right, it could mean good news for businesses and shoppers. “I’m much more optimistic about 2022 than I was about 2021,” Rios, who served in that role as part of the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2016, tells CNBC. Rios admits that continued uncertainty around Covid-19, and variants like delta and omicron, could always throw the country’s economy off course yet again.
First-time unemployment filings fell sharply to reach their lowest level since 1969 in early December, coming in below 190,000. And even with the latest move higher, the four-week moving average for new claims — which smooths out volatility in the weekly data – came in at the lowest level since November 1969, dropping by 16,000 week-over-week to reach 203,750.
Corcentric, a leading provider of payments, accounts payable, and accounts receivable technology to enterprise and middle-market companies, and North Mountain Merger Corp., a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement to consummate a business combination (the “Transaction”) that would result in Corcentric becoming a publicly listed company. Upon the closing of the Transaction, the combined entity (the “Company”) will be named Corcentric Inc. The Company is expected to have an implied pro forma enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion at closing.
As the largest acquirer in the U.S. by e-commerce processing, J.P. Morgan has a unique vantage point into the buying behavior of consumers. This year’s November shopping season looked quite different across the U.S. and Canada according to new data from J.P. Morgan. In 2020 we saw a big push to e-commerce as the world adjusted to the challenges of the pandemic. In 2021, we saw a holiday shopping season that started much earlier in November.
Adyen, the global payments platform of choice for many of the world’s leading companies, has been selected by Henry’s Enterprises Inc., Canada’s leading specialty digital imaging retailer, to process payments across in-store and online commerce channels. By unifying their sales channels on a single platform, Henry’s will have seamless, consistent, and cross-channel customer journeys, deeper engagement with customers to build loyalty, keep reconciliation simple, and capture rich customer insights.
The New York Islanders and UBS Arena at Belmont Park, the New York metropolitan area’s newest premier entertainment and sports venue, are engaging fans, streamlining food and beverage ordering, and meeting growing consumer demand for digital and contactless payment options with the implementation of Clover® point-of-sale hardware and Bypass point-of-sale software from Fiserv, Inc., a leading global provider of payments and financial services technology.
StorageMart, the largest privately owned self-storage company in the world, announced they will be implementing end-to-end payment processing from Shift4, the leader in integrated payments and commerce technology. Shift4’s unified commerce ecosystem simplifies the entire payment experience for businesses by providing every component of the payments process from a single vendor. This includes the software integration, secure payment devices, PCI-validated point-to-point encryption, mobile and contactless technologies, advanced reporting and business intelligence, and more.
Paysafe, a leading specialized payments platform, announced a partnership with Output Services Group (OSG), a global provider of customer engagement and payment solutions. OSG, which provides online billing and payment solutions to many industries serving U.S. consumers, will now offer the Paysafecash™ online cash solution as an alternative payment method to their platform, further promoting financial inclusion for unbanked and cash-focused consumers to pay their bills online.
JCB International Co., Ltd., the international operations subsidiary of JCB Co., Ltd., and Planet, a global integrated payments leader, announced the expansion of their European partnership. This new deal ensures Planet will perform as a JCB acquirer across European territories for both face-to-face and ecommerce transactions, including JCB Contactless, with J/Secure(TM) 2.0-enabled ecommerce to be offered online in early 2022.
Amit Nayyar, the former president of Indian payments behemoth Paytm, was hired by JPMorgan Chase & Co. to head up its advisory work with European FinTech companies. Nayyar left Paytm in July, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday (Dec. 14). Nayyar will start with JPMorgan on Monday (Dec. 20) and will lead FinTech and payments coverage for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a JPMorgan spokesperson said. He will work out of the London office and report to Matt Gehl and Xavier Bindel, co-heads of EMEA technology investment banking.
Worldline, a global leader in the payments and transactional services industry, is partnering with Bexs Pay, a leading Brazil-based payment provider, to launch a cross-border remittance product for online payments from Brazil, South America’s most vibrant economy. The product combines Bexs Pay’s wide range of payment methods with Worldline’s ability to process payments without the need for a local entity, making it a powerful solution for international online businesses.
Latin American commerce platform Ebanx has acquired Brazillian remittance house Remessa Online for $229 million. Founded in 2016, Remessa Online currently has 320 employees and serves more than 350,000 companies and consumers from 100 countries, processing more than $5.2 billion in remittance inflow and outflow since inception. In 2020, the company expanded its geographic footprint to Argentina and Chile, adding to its international operations in Australia, Canada, Europe, the UK and the US.
Simpay, a full-service payments, payroll, and POS provider, is continuing to expand their executive leadership team with the appointment of Michael Hervis as Senior Vice President of Enterprise Sales. “We're thrilled to announce that Michael is heading Simpay’s Enterprise Sales Division. With his extensive industry background, he'll drive our expansion in alignment with the Simpay roadmap”, said Lazaros Kalemis, Simpay’s Founder and CEO.
​VizyPay, an award-winning provider of simple and transparent payment technology solutions for small to midsize businesses, announces four new senior additions to the company: Chief Strategy Officer Outhay Lovan, Director of Banking Partnerships Mary Bakkie, Director of Client Success Trinh Le-Coulter, and Director of Strategic Partnerships Jesse James. They will streamline and integrate VizyPay’s processes to efficiently identify new leads and offer the company’s best-in-class services to a greater number of small business owners.
Aliaswire, a provider of digital payment and credit solutions for businesses and financial institutions, and Nacha announced that Aliaswire will join the Phixius Peer-to-Peer Network for the exchange of payment-related data. Established and operated by Nacha, the Phixius Peer-to-Peer Network allows participants to instantaneously exchange and verify payment-related information to enable more efficient and secure electronic payments.