Acquiring

The national trend of merchants passing on their credit card fees continues to accelerate, aided last week by a federal court striking down Texas’s “no-surcharge” law as unconstitutional. The Texas ruling follows the defeat of no-surcharge laws in Florida and California, but it is a unique milestone: Texas is the …

PayPal Holdings Inc. announced a partnership with the National Basketball Association’s Phoenix Suns that makes PayPal a payment option on some point-of-sale terminals in the Suns’ arena. The PayPal logo also will adorn players’ jerseys beginning Oct. 17, when the NBA season starts. Free Speech Systems LLC, the company behind …

The debit interchange controls of the Durbin Amendment went into effect seven years ago Monday, and to mark the occasion the Electronic Payments Coalition issued its latest salvo in what appears to be a never-ending feud over that law. According to survey results released by the EPC, 52% of registered …

Unattended payments provider USA Technologies Inc. reported that it was unable to file its overdue annual report for fiscal 2018 to the Securities and Exchange Commission within the 15-day extension it asked for in September. The company said it is still investigating certain contractual arrangements that prompted it to ask …

The word “regulation” generates little enthusiasm in the merchant-acquiring industry, but it’s more palatable when “self” is the operative adjective rather than “government.” Thus, the Electronic Transactions Association is pushing its new Self-Regulation Program for acquirers, independent sales organizations, and payment facilitators. Launched early this month, the voluntary program requires …

Biometric authentication may be coming into its own as a tool to aid financial institutions and payments companies in serving their customers. At financial institutions, as much as $20.75 million is saved annually using biometric authentication instead of SMS one-time password services, says Reston, Va.-based Daon Inc., a biometric-services company, …

Few businesses have been more targeted by the trend toward integrated payments than restaurants, and late on Thursday that trend unfolded further with Global Payments Inc.’s agreement to lay out $490 million in cash for Sicom Systems Inc., a Lansdale, Pa.-based developer of both front- and back-of-the-store management systems for …

A new micropayment platform called Qoins has just closed a first round of funding for $1 million. The app allows users to pay off debt by rounding up purchases to the nearest dollar and sending the excess to the creditor, with a focus on credit card and student debt. Qoins …

BNY Mellon has become the first bank client to sign a reseller agreement with Early Warning Services’ Zelle person-to-person payment network for tokenized disbursements to consumers. Zelle indicated earlier this year it would expand into disbursements as a potential field for fee-based payment services. Zelle also announced Dollar Bank now offers Zelle …

EBay Inc. on Tuesday announced it has “begun managing payments” on its massive marketplace and said it expects to have a “majority” of sellers converted to the new program by 2021. Under the new payments regime, sellers will encounter lower transaction costs, eBay’s announcement said, though it did not offer …