The bare-knuckled fight between leading U.S. point-of-sale terminal manufacturer VeriFone Holdings Inc. and the big merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. keeps on escalating, with four lawsuits in three courts now pending. Both companies continue to crank out press releases, letters from their chief executives, and other public-relations missives that …

Mercantile Bank of Michigan has an answer for observers who want to know why financial institutions are starting to show an interest in person-to-person payments. It comes down to competition for deposits, says John Schulte, senior vice president and chief information officer at the bank, which will introduce a commercial …

In a move that could change the way consumers shop and pay on the Web, a startup called Payvment is marketing a free shopping cart that lets online shoppers accumulate merchandise from a variety of Web sites?including Facebook?and then pay for all of it with a single checkout. “We call …

Electronic person-to-person payments have been around this entire decade, but they're still largely the domain of specialists such as PayPal Inc. and a host of tech companies. But leading bank processors are getting into the P2P act, and if they're successful they could spur greater usage from the consumer mainstream …

Bank of America Corp. gave some insights into its fast-growing mobile-banking service, but the bank also acknowledged that it must convince skeptical customers that the service is valuable and secure. Charlotte, N.C.-based BofA started a controlled rollout of mobile banking in early 2007 and launched the service nationwide in the …

Heartland Payment Systems Inc. is accusing VeriFone Holdings Inc. of “tampering” with Heartland customers after the San Jose, Calif.-based terminal company said it will terminate its support relationships with Heartland customers, effective Dec. 31. VeriFone says it will offer complete alternative support at no cost to affected merchants. Heartland merchants …

Hoping to inspire a burst of innovation beyond what it could expect to deliver within its own research-and-development budget, PayPal Inc. on Tuesday officially turned its global payment engine over to software developers with an array of new application programming interfaces (APIs). With the unveiling of the APIs, which took …

Cynergy Data LLC, the big independent sales organization that filed for bankruptcy Sept. 1, got a second lease on life last week when the sale of its assets to The ComVest Group, a private-equity firm with holdings in other payment processors, closed. ComVest paid $81 million for Long Island City, …

PIN-debit is now live on the Web with Monday's announcement that Accel/Exchange is the first electronic funds transfer network to roll out such a service. The network, a unit of Brookfield, Wis.-based Fiserv Inc., is making the PaySecure system from technology provider Acculynk Inc. available to its membership base this …

Just three weeks after its parent company struck a novel deal with PayPal Inc., The Star Network pushed the boundaries of PIN-debit a bit further by unveiling a prepaid card reload service for ATMs and point-of-sale locations. Star, a unit of Atlanta-based processor First Data Corp., claims its load and …