Acquiring

Colony Bankcorp Inc. announced it has launched a merchant-acquiring division led by Steve Raines as director for merchant services. Raines most recently was director at Synovus Merchant Services.Laurentian Bank of Canada said it will work with the card-issuing platform Brim Financial to issue Visa products in 2022, with features including instant virtual …

Mastercard Inc. said it is acquiring Dynamic Yield, a data personalization platform, from McDonald’s Corp. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.The University of Kansas has agreed to support the Passport app to pay for parking at 3,600 spaces across the campus. More than 800 cities, universities, and private operators now deploy Passport, …

Taptap Send, a startup providing instant-payment capability for cross-border transfers, announced a $65-million Series B funding round led by Spark Capital. Its total financing now tops $80 million.Humboldt State University will adopt the Passport Parking app for on-campus parking beginning Jan. 18, announced Passport Parking.The Center for Advanced Facial Plastic Surgery said …

The explosion in buy now, pay later point-of-sale lending was bound to catch the eye of regulators sooner or later, and on Thursday the other shoe dropped with a letter sent to five leading BNPL firms from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau requesting information on their services. The five—Affirm Inc., …

Food-ordering and delivery provider Waitr Holdings Inc. said it has entered into a non-binding letter of intent to acquire Retail Innovation Labs Inc., known as Cova, a provider of point-of-sale software for cannabis dispensaries. The deal calls for a price of $90 million in cash and stock.Agilysys Inc., a provider of payments …

The move toward cashless sports stadiums continues to accelerate. UBS Arena, home of the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders, has contracted with Fiserv Inc. to install Clover point-of-sale hardware and Bypass point-of-sale software to enable digital and contactless payment options throughout the venue.  UBS Arena will deploy more than …

Six U.S. Senators sent a letter to Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, asking the agency to initiate a review of buy now, pay later products with a view toward introducing consumer protections. All six Senators are Democratic members of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.Online gaming operator PointsBet has …

There are few subjects that raise the ire of merchants more than the runaway costs of card acceptance. For years, many have grumbled about the costs but felt powerless to do anything about them. Now, as the result of a chain of court victories at the state and federal level, …

New research from Fiserv Inc. found that 16% of U.S. consumers have used cryptocurrency at least once to pay for goods and services. The survey of 2,200 U.S. adults also revealed that 25% of crypto users cited lack of merchant acceptance as the primary limitation to increasing the use of crypto as …

Sweden’s Klarna AB has 21 million users in the U.S. market for its buy now, pay later app, but it wants a lot more. On Tuesday, it announced it will ease payments for its users by letting them pay off installments via direct transfers from their bank account. The service …