Acquiring

• Fifty-six percent of all bills in the U.S. are paid online at a biller, bank, or third-party site, according to data from ACI Worldwide and Aite Group. Of these, 72% are now paid at biller sites. • Digital-payments company Proxama PLC has agreed to provide payments services to clients of payment …

• Processing-software vendor Womply has launched an analytics tool called Retention Intelligence to help acquirers identify merchants likely to leave the portfolio. • A 2-year-old startup called diningData, which processes payments and analyzes data for restaurants, announced it is now handling $1 billion in annual volume. The company is a division of Hadfield …

Fourth-quarter profits and U.S. charge volume declined while marketing expenses increased for American Express Co. as the company continued to dig its way out of the hole left last year by the termination of its U.S. cobranding and acceptance pact with Costco Wholesale Corp. New York City-based AmEx reported Thursday …

• Mastercard Inc. and investor and philanthropist George Soros announced plans “to explore private-sector solutions to societal challenges” by possibly creating a so-called social enterprise called Humanity Ventures that will apply commercial strategies to address such problems as joblessness and lack of access to health care and education. Soros might …

The Electronic Transactions Association went on record Tuesday supporting the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s proposed limited-purpose national bank charter for financial technology companies, but a national trade group of small banks “expressed strong concerns” about the idea. The opinions expressed by the ETA and the Independent Community …

• The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has accepted in principle a number of proposals Mastercard Inc. has made to dispel concerns the agency expressed earlier this month about the planned $920 million merger of Mastercard and the U.K.-based payments-technology firm VocaLink. The CMA had been concerned that the merger would hand Mastercard …

Payments provider Clearent LLC is buying Payment Alliance International’s merchant-services division, which serves more than 17,000 merchants, for an undisclosed amount, Clearent announced Wednesday. The deal adds $4.2 billion in processing volume to Clearent, pushing the combined entity’s total processing volume to $14 billion and its total number of merchants …

• Merchant processor iPayment Inc., along with its parent company iPayment Holdings Inc., announced a refinancing with holders of its senior secured notes that company officials say should result in a “substantial deleveraging” of the company and enable it to add services and products. • Equinox Payments LLC said it supports Android Pay …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group is among many payments companies making announcements Monday at the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show in New York City. France-based Ingenico says its ePayments division and its research arm Ingenico Labs now offer payment-enabled messaging bots for e-commerce merchants. Bots are an artificial intelligence …

The announcements about new point-of-sale and mobile-payment systems and related services came fast and furious Monday at the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show underway in New York City. • Samsung Electronics America, Inc. and independent sales organization Total Merchant Services Inc. announced the availability of TMS’s Groovv POS Flex, …