Financial/Banking

Consumers in Columbus, Ohio, are being given a new option for mobile payment.

CurrentC, the mobile payment application from retailer-backed consortium Merchant Commerce Exchange, is now being piloted at stores in Columbus. Major retailers currently participating in MCX include Walmart, Sam’s Club, Sears, Target, CVS and Kmart.

MCX briefly announced the Columbus beta test on the CurrentC webpage, with few details. Reuters reports that 12 major retailers are testing the service at 200 store locations, and the test may be expanded in early 2016.

Rite Aid is making some key executive moves even as the company is on the verge of merging with Walgreens in a $17.2 billion deal.

Rite Aid announced that Darren Karst has been promoted to the combined role of senior executive VP and CFO and chief administrative officer, effective immediately. He will continue to report to Rite Aid chairman and CEO John T. Standley.

The latest case of reported retail POS fraud highlights the need for EMV adoption.

Regional convenience chain Casey’s General Stores Inc., which operates 1,887 stores in 14 states, has confirmed that credit card skimming devices were discovered at six of its stores in Nebraska and one store in Iowa.

Greensboro, N.C. -- Tanger Factory Outlet Centers, Inc. announced the election of David B. Henry to its board of directors, effective Jan. 1.

Henry will retire from his current role as vice chairman of the board and CEO of Kimco Realty Corporation, effective Jan. 1. He joined Kimco, North America's largest publicly traded owner and operator of open air shopping centers, in April 2001 as vice chairman and chief investment officer, served as its president from December 2008 through August 2014, and has served as CEO since December 2009.

E-commerce and payment solutions provider First Data is in a new partnership with a financial services company led by a PayPal co-founder that is said to increase average order values by as much at 80%, and conversion rates by more than 20%.

Boston – Gordon Brothers announced that Alex Sutton, managing director of Industrial Inventory for Gordon Brothers-AccuVal, will be honored by the Commercial Finance Association with the 2015 Harry H. Chen Memorial Instructor of the Year Award.

Two weeks after publicly stating it had lost $56 million processing payments for Starbucks, Square no longer has to worry about future losses.

Starbucks has selected Chase Commerce Solutions, the global payment processing and merchant acquiring division of JPMorgan Chase & Co., to transition processing of all non-mobile payments and U.S. retail card payment transactions in company-operated stores. Chase will also partner with Starbucks on the rollout of chip-enabled payment terminals.

A new study from Juniper Research has found that the increased rollout of contactless payment services using fingerprint scanners will push the number of biometrically authenticated transactions to nearly 5 billion by 2019, up from less than 130 million this year.

The research observed that at present, only two services, Apple Pay and Samsung, used fingerprint scanners for authentication, with availability currently limited to the U.S. and U.K. for the former, and the U.S. and South Korea for the latter.