•  PayPal Holdings Inc. will not follow through on plans announced two weeks ago to expand in Charlotte, N.C., and add 400 jobs because of North Carolina’s recently enacted House Bill 2, which PayPal says “perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of …

• VeriFone Systems Inc. introduced Verifone Carbon, a black, portable point-of-sale system for café owners, quick-service restaurants, and stores that features a tablet screen for the merchant and a smaller screen for the customer, and a stand with a built-in printer. The Intel-powered device includes VeriFone’s cloud-based Commerce Platform that …

• Prepaid card services provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. acquired extrameasures LLC, a promotions and incentives firm that offers Visa-branded and private-label rewards and gift cards. The deal follows Blackhawk’s acquisitions of other incentives companies, including Parago, InteliSpend, CardLab, and Incentive Solutions.   • Prepaid card provider Green Dot Corp. …

The U.S. payments industry is keeping a watchful eye on friendly-fraud chargebacks now that the EMV liability shift is in effect. According to software enterprise CA Technologies, global card-not-present fraud by 2018 will be at least double the $2.9 billion logged in 2014. Fraudulent chargebacks, always a risk for sellers, …

• Braintree launched Braintree Auth as an invitation-only service in beta. The service streamlines integration of Braintree merchants with e-commerce platforms and eases the way for new payment methods enabled by Braintree, a unit of PayPal Holdings Inc. Braintree Auth currently processes payments on e-commerce platforms Bigcommerce, WooCommerce, and 3DCart. …

• The Federal Reserve picked consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to support its Faster Payments Task Force efforts this year by assessing solution proposals from various payments providers. • Merchant processor Square Inc. announced its “Build With Square,” a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrates point-of-sale and-online payments capabilities with …

• Nearly half—48%—of ATM operators did not have EMV acceptance enabled on their machines at the end of 2015, finds the 2016 ATM Channel EMV Readiness Survey released by the ATM Industry Association. Fourteen months ago, the survey predicted that figure would be 12%. Continuing uncertainty and confusion, routing issues, and …

• Starbucks Corp. said JPMorgan Chase & Co. by year’s end will issue a Visa-branded Starbucks reloadable prepaid card that will allow cardholders to earn Starbucks “stars,” or loyalty points, for purchases just about anywhere Visa is accepted; the new card is an extension of Starbucks’ relationship with JPMorgan Chase’s …

By Eugene Rome   Merchant-service providers of all shapes and sizes learn the hard way that cutting corners by using cut-and-paste tactics to create a merchant agreement can end up in costly litigation. Independent sales organizations, third-party processors, and payment facilitators must have a merchant agreement that is tailored to …

• NCR Corp. says its Epsilon payments application received EMV certification from First Data Corp., enabling the app to process credit and debit EMV transactions in its Radiant POS and StorePoint POS products. • Former Merchant Customer Exchange LLC chief executive Dekkers L. Davidson joined the InStream Inc. board of directors. …