The corporate credit card fintech raised $300M just 6 months after its last mega-round, enabling it to continue building out its product suite.

Spending on travel and entertainment and goods and services saw strong growth driven by Amex’s rewards revamp—and the issuer can keep riding this wave by gearing rewards and solutions to younger consumers.

Its deal for Fair Square Financial marks the digital-only bank’s second attempt at buying a credit-card company in less than two years.

Buy now, pay later solutions are quickly gaining adoption as consumers look for new financing options and merchants aim to drive sales. But the industry is still unsettled as a number of firms are battling to lead the space, while card networks and issuers are looking to get involved too.

Features linked to usage of retailer credit cards were excluded. Key Findings:. Free shipping with no minimum (and two-day or faster shipping, if possible) should be the centerpiece of any paid membership strategy and is necessary to stay competitive. Free return shipping is equally important for apparel consumers.

Issuers’ pursuit of clear value propositions and forays into next-gen credit building services offer a window into their plans to attract customers and combat competition.

Cash-back credit cards could make themselves more appealing to prospective customers with a few key features.

The US has been relatively late in introducing contactless cards, which are credit or debit cards that include a near field communication (NFC) chip that can complete a transaction simply by tapping on a reader. But those cards are starting to arrive in the US now that most point-of-sale (POS) systems have the NFC capabilities to accept them.

Key context: Transaction fees are critical to card networks and issuers for security and fraud prevention, innovation, and funding rewards programs and other value-added features. And transaction-based income will become even more important as card spending accounts for around 8 in 10 dollars spent across channels this year, per our forecasts.

But when it came to rewards offered, more than two-thirds (68.7%) of respondents used their credit cards versus the 24.3% who used BNPL.

The card network has been planning its foray into the crypto space and will soon launch its first crypto rewards credit card with BlockFi. And last month, it announced plans to settle transactions in USD Coin, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar.

As consumers have gotten more comfortable using debit cards online, US digital debit card spending has outpaced that of credit cards. Transaction value will fall in 2021, but we expect growth to return in 2022.