Acquiring

The tug-of-war over Earthport PLC continues. Visa Inc. upped its offer for the British business-to-business payment processor in a bidding war that started after Mastercard Inc. topped Visa’s original price. Visa is now offering 37 pence per share, which values the company at £247 million ($320.4 million). Visa’s new offer …

Twenty-two days of talking to clients haven’t dampened Fiserv Inc.’s conviction that offering to buy First Data Corp. is the right move. In fact, if anything these conversations seem to have buoyed top executives’ confidence in the proposed $22 billion all-stock acquisition of the big processor. “We’ve spent a substantial …

Segpay Corp. debuted its Merchant Services Group, which is tasked with direct merchant-account placement, gateway, and other services for e-commerce merchants. Segpay has operated as a payment facilitator since 2005. A subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee will have a hearing at 2 p.m. Est. Feb. …

As if retailers and merchants didn’t have anything else to worry about, a malware threat called IcedID wants to set itself off as a special type, says a researcher at IBM Corp. In a blog post released Wednesday, the researcher says the criminal gangs using IcedID—disovered and named by IBM …

Merchant-processing revenues from North America grew 7% year-over-year in 2018’s fourth quarter to $1.1 billion on a comparable accounting basis, First Data Corp. reported Wednesday. First Data, which has an agreement to be acquired by processor Fiserv Inc. in a $22 billion all-stock deal, reported total quarterly revenues of $1.42 …

With the proposed merger of processing giants First Data Corp. and Fiserv Inc. looming over the payments landscape, players that both work and compete with the two companies are in a potentially ticklish position. But the chief executive of one such company made it clear Wednesday morning that First Data …

Mastercard Inc. named Paul Stoddart, who had been CEO of Vocalink after Mastercard acquired the U.K.-based real-time payments firm in 2017, as president, New Payment Platforms, effective March 1. Stoddart will oversee development of Mastercard’s real-time capabilities beyond traditional card-based services, including Vocalink, the Homesend joint venture, and Mastercard Send. …

PayPal Holdings Inc. says it has lent $50 billion to American consumers since it bought the BillMeLater lending service 11 years ago. The company also advanced its efforts to generate revenues from its Venmo peer-to-peer payment service by making subscription payments to the Tidal music-streaming service available through Venmo. Now …

The concept of push payments is finding favor among payments providers as two companies separately announce new disbursement services. Atlanta-based Repay said its Instant Funding service enables organizations to send funds directly to eligible Visa Inc. debit and prepaid cards via Visa Direct, the network’s real-time debit service. Repay’s lending clients, …

Point-of-sale technology provider Revel Systems released two new product lines, Revel Enterprise, for multilocation businesses, and Revel Essentials, aimed at restaurants and businesses with 20 or fewer locations. Shift4 Payments renamed its payment-management platform Lighthouse Transaction Manager. Formerly Dollars on the Net, the service enables merchants to access transaction reporting, …