Acquiring

Square Inc. will apply for a Utah industrial bank charter today, a move that will extend the merchant processor’s move into lending and one which could draw the opposition of banks. The bank will be capitalized with $56 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. The financial operation will be …

Francisco Partners, a private-equity fund, has made an investment in Network Merchants Inc., a provider of payments technology and gateways to merchants and independent sales organizations. The unspecified investment is said to be “substantial.” Consequent to the deal, existing investor Bregal Sagemount will exit, and existing investor Great Hill Partners will …

Marketers of integrated, cloud-based point-of-sale systems take note. It’s not enough to have full-featured service replete with multiple functions. It also takes a sales approach that is responsive and knowledgeable. That may sound like common-sense idea, but it’s one that has been vetted by The Strawhecker Group in its “The …

The Federal Reserve issued a paper outlining “refreshed strategies and nine new tactics” for improving the U.S. payment system; the paper is a follow-up to the Fed’s strategic vision for payments issued in January 2015 and comes in the wake of the July report from the Fed’s Faster Payments Task Force. The Federal Trade …

As businesses in the Houston area attempt to recover following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey in late August, the payments industry is offering assistance. First Data Corp. is offering thousands of its Clover Go mobile credit and debit card readers free to business owners affected by the hurricane. The offer includes …

Performance Matters, which offers professional instruction for public-school educators, has agreed to use SchoolPay, a unit of My Payment Network, to process payments for professional development for teachers in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms. MoneyOnMobile Inc., a Dallas-based company with operations in India, said it processed more than 1 million domestic transfers in …

The financial-services industry can take some satisfaction that it has improved its overall compliance with the PCI data-security standard, going from 42.9% of firms in full compliance in 2015 to 59.1% in 2016, as measured in the 2017 Payment Security Report from Verizon Enterprise, the business-services unit of telecommunications carrier …

Change. It’s one of the most feared events in one’s life; personally and professionally. People are scared of the unknown, which makes them naturally resistant to change. This fear is one of the primary reasons why evolving, or changing, an organization is one of the most difficult leadership challenges most …

Total spending via contactless mobile payments in the United States will exceed $1,000 per user for the first time in 2017, reaching $1,026, according to forecasts by eMarketer. Total U.S. contactless mobile payments will hit $49.29 billion this year, up 78.1% from 2016, the firm projects. Fiserv Inc. completed its $89-million, cash acquisition …

Google plans soon to give merchants access to the vast trove of credit card credentials it has in its databases to speed customer checkout for mobile and online payments. The search-engine giant, however, is not putting itself in competition with payment card networks, a Google executive said this week. The …