Five months after announcing its deal to acquire buy now, pay later provider Afterpay Ltd., Block Inc. is making Afterpay available to Square sellers in the United States and Australia. The move comes as Block, Square’s parent company, officially closed the Afterpay acquisition on Monday. Block agreed to buy Afterpay …

Full-service restaurants, one of the hardest-hit merchant segments at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, showed signs of a rebound in 2021, according to research by TouchBistro Inc., a provider of POS and restaurant-management applications. Findings from TouchBistro’s third annual “State of Full-Service Restaurants Report” reveals that 74% of full-service restaurants …

With the Covid-19 pandemic helping fuel broad adoption of Quick Response codes by merchants for payments and ordering, it was only a matter of time before criminals exploited the contactless technology. Fraudsters are creating fake QR codes that, when scanned, take consumers to a bogus landing page that collects payment …

The vision of turning mobile devices into tap-and-go POS terminals took a big step forward Thursday as MagicCube Inc. announced i-Accept Cloud, an open, cloud-based softPOS acceptance platform. i-Accept Cloud is expected to simplify the creation of new merchant payment acceptance and digital commerce solutions. By connecting the currently siloed …

On Tuesday, Plaid Inc., a bellwether of the open-banking movement, announced the availability of Plaid Portal US, a privacy tool for consumers using Plaid’s technology. The move comes as firms that connect financial-services providers with consumer-account data seek to help account owners manage how their information is distributed and used by …

Seeing an opportunity to offer payment acceptance along with its encryption and tokenization technologies to its enterprise clients, Bluefin Payment Systems LLC has invested an undisclosed sum in payment facilitator Payfactory Inc. The investment, which will create a strategic relationship between the two companies, will enable Payfactory to expand its …

Data-compromise incidents hit an all-time high in 2021, totaling 1,862, up 23% from the previous record high of 1,506 in 2017, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s Annual Data Breach Report. On a year-over-year basis, the number of the compromises increased 68% in 2021, compared to 2020. The number …

Looking to help fintechs speed development of new banking applications, Unit, a banking-as-a-service platform, announced Thursday a pilot production environment that allows fintechs to instantly build and validate applications using real funds. The new product is expected to enable fintechs to build and test live bank accounts and issue virtual …

Add Las Vegas’s T-Mobile Arena to Shift4 Payments Inc.’s growing list of sports and entertainment venues to which the company provides payment processing. T-Mobile Arena is home to the National Hockey League’s Las Vegas Golden Knights franchise and hosts other entertainment events on the Las Vegas strip.  Shift4 will process …

Terminal maker Verifone Inc. expanded its buy now pay later options Tuesday through a partnership with Affirm Inc. The deal will enable merchants using Verifone terminals to automatically offer Affirm as a payment option online and in-store. Merchants will be able to offer Affirm’s full range of payment options, including …