Acquiring

• Prepaid card program manager Green Dot Corp. has expanded its Instant Pay disbursement program with on-demand car-hailing service Uber to enable real-time payment of driver pay to almost any Discover, MasterCard, or Visa debit card, using MasterCard Inc.’s MasterCard Send service. Up to now, Instant Pay driver disbursements were …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Acquirers that service merchants that still use dial-up point-of-sale terminals have a new option for connecting these no-longer-mainstream devices to processors with the launch of a new product from Transaction Network Services Inc. Announced Tuesday, the service from Reston, Va.-based TNS provides acquirers with one connection to …

• Mobile point-of-sale service provider Cardflight announced that processor BluePay Processing LLC is now offering the Cardflight SwipeSimple service to merchants. • Revel Systems, provider of iPad-based point-of-sale technology, and Intuit Inc. expanded an existing partnership to bring Intuit QuickBooks Point of Sale services to salon and grocery retailers. The …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews When Intuit Inc. launched QuickBooks Point of Sale with tablet-payments specialist Smoothie King Franchises Inc., a chain of 700 juice outlets, to install Revel tablets chainwide in what at the time was the largest such deal on record. Earlier this month, news emerged that IBM Corp. …

By John Stewart@DTPaymentNews The U.S. EMV transition that began in earnest last October has brought with it a lot of pain, but few issues have been more agonizing for merchants than the flood of chargebacks they’re seeing for the first time. Now estimates are emerging that begin to quantify that …

• The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and its Michigan State Disbursement unit are allowing parents who choose a cash option online for child-support payments to make the payments at 7-Eleven and Family Dollar stores, with processing handled by PayNearMe. The arrangement follows a similar venture in which PayNearMe …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews It’s no secret the U.S. point of sale is undergoing perhaps the most extensive overhaul in its long and storied history, but now there’s evidence that a crowd of technology startups are sharing in the bounty that sweeping modernization is generating. Point-of-sale startups will likely reap …

• Prepaid card provider Green Dot Corp. reported that second-quarter net income more than doubled from a year earlier to $7.78 million on a 2% increase in operating revenues to $173.5 million. While Green Dot’s active card count of 4.28 million was down 11% from a year earlier, purchase volume …

• The Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index found that checks, at 90%, and cash, at 72%, continue to reign as the top payment methods accepted by small businesses. A printed check from a bill-pay service was next, at 53%, followed by credit or debit card at a point-of-sale terminal, 42%, …

Card-brand efforts to improve consumers’ perceptions of EMV transaction speeds took a step ahead this week when a grocer debuted updated EMV software on its point-of-sale systems. New Seasons Markets, including its New Leaf Community Markets unit, is now using the Quick Chip and M/Chip Fast technologies from Visa Inc. …