Acquiring

Lighthouse Network, the company behind such acquiring and point-of-sale brands as Harbortouch and POSitouch, announced Monday it has purchased Shift4 Corp., a Las Vegas-based payment gateway, for an undisclosed amount. Allentown, Pa.-based Lighthouse also announced it would adopt the Shift4 name, rebranding itself as Shift4 Payments. It was only in …

Cardlytics Inc., which provides marketers with payment card purchase information as well as ACH and bill-payment data from 2,000 partner financial institutions, filed for a $75 million initial public offering. Cardlytics says that in 2016 its platform analyzed more than 18 billion online and in-store transactions across more than 94 million accounts, …

Visa Inc.’s announcement Friday that it will make signature authentication optional for EMV contact and contactless transactions in North America starting in April might provide another boost for merchants who have yet to adopt chip-card acceptance, suggests an analyst. Signatures remain a requirement for Visa magnetic stripe-based transactions not subject to …

Visa Inc. is joining the other three card brands in making signatures optional for many of its transactions beginning in April. The card brand, which had credit card volume of $499 billion and debit volume of $388 billion in its fourth quarter ended Sept. 30, says in a blog post published …

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by assets and the biggest bank that runs its own merchant-acquiring operation, reported Friday that it processed $1.19 trillion in payment volume from merchants last year, up 12% from $1.06 trillion in 2016. Chase’s merchant volume rose 13% in 2017’s fourth quarter …

Processor JetPay Corp. announced its payments, payroll, and account-opening services are now available to clients of Bolts Technologies, a software provider specializing in deposit account onboarding for financial institutions. VeriFone Systems Inc. introduced its e280, a mobile point-of-sale device with a 3.5-inch color touchscreen that accepts near-field communication contactless payments, …

A ranking of retailers offering optimal mobile-shopping experiences in their stores places building materials retailer Lowe’s Companies Inc. atop the list, announced DMI, a mobile-retail specialist. Among the criteria Bethesda, Md.-based DMI, a unit of Digital Management LLC, evaluated in its “Mobile Maturity Model: 2018 Retail” report were pricing, inventory, …

The U.S. Marshals Service plans to auction 3,813 Bitcoins in 11 blocks Jan. 22. The agency acquired the digital currency through forfeitures in 18 federal criminal, civil, and administrative cases. Bidder registration opens today. At Thursday morning’s price of approximately $14,000 per Bitcoin, the assets are worth about $53.4 million. …

Overall U.S holiday sales in 2017 grew 6.2% over 2016, a pace that bested 2016’s 4.7% sales-growth rate, First Data Corp. announced Wednesday in its latest SpendTrend report. Retail spending during the Oct. 28 to Jan. 1 period increased 5.4%, compared to a 3.6% growth rate in 2016. Measured at …

Payment-security provider Bluefin Payment Systems announced that Choice Entertainment Technologies will offer Bluefin’s point-to-point encryption service to users of its ChoiceCRM platform for performing-arts organizations. Payments company Wirecard AG is providing services to Moonrise, a unit of American Family Insurance. Moonrise enables employers to pay shift workers using a Wirecard-issued …