• The Merchants Payments Coalition, a lobbying group for merchants on payment issues, attacked a Harvard University research paper as “just plain wrong” after the paper argued the debit-interchange caps in the Durbin Amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act drove up banking costs for consumers.
• Terminal maker Ingenico Group said its mobile point-of-sale unit, Ingenico Mobile Solutions, introduced an mPOS software development kit for EMV chip card payments that is aimed at allowing developers to more easily integrate EMV into their applications.
• Merchant processor Total Merchant Services Inc. made its Groovv software development kit available to software and app developers. Using the SDK, developers can integrate TMS payment services into their apps and software, offloading the transaction flow to TMS. The kit also includes a point-of-sale terminal.
• ACI Worldwide Inc., a payments-software firm, appointed Hannes van Rensburg as senior vice president of business development. Van Rensburg founded mobile-banking company Fundamo in 1999, which Visa Inc. purchased in 2011, after which he worked at Visa as a senior vice president.
• Tokenization provider Shift4 Corp. noted its customer base recently surpassed 33,000 clients.
• Merchant processor Electronic Payment Exchange says it supports a pair of Ingenico Group point-of-sale terminals as part of its EPXPay Wi-Fi service for POS systems.
• Sabre Corp., a vendor of travel-related technology, introduced its Sabre Virtual Payments Ticketer, an application that allows travelers to use a virtual, one-time card number to pay for lodging and rail tickets along with airline tickets.