Acquiring

• Noting that U.S. businesses send consumers write 3 billion paper checks annually, Wells Fargo & Co. said it will allow companies to send consumer payments electronically through a new service called Payment Manager B2P, expected to roll out early next year. The service will work with the clearXchange peer-to-peer …

American Express Co. made available Wednesday the AmEx Quick Chip program that enables a seemingly speedier EMV chip card transaction. Similar to what MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. recently announced, the AmEx program enables consumers to remove their AmEx chip cards from readers once the card has been verified instead …

The Home Depot Inc.’s new lawsuit against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. makes many of the same antitrust allegations that other merchants have lodged against the big networks in recent years. The suit, however, is notable for asking the court to quash Visa’s Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF) and, like …

• The Home Depot Inc. filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. for alleged lax security practices and a preference for higher-margin signature authentication with EMV chip credit cards over more secure PIN authentication, according to the Associated Press. A MasterCard spokesperson told the AP that …

• Payments veteran Michael J. Schwartz was appointed interim chief executive of mobile-payments and -marketing firm Spindle Inc. upon founding chief executive Bill Clark’s resignation. Schwartz comes to the company from Fiserv Inc. Clark had been CEO since 2011. • Processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) purchased the 45% stake …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s 400-store Canadian unit announced Saturday that it will no longer accept Visa payment cards in its stores beginning with phased discontinuance starting July 18. “Following an evaluation of credit card transaction fees in Canada and the rest of the world, we have concluded the fees applied to …

• ATM deployer Cardtronics Inc. reached a new agreement with the Chicago Transit Authority under which it will place almost 40 new ATMs at CTA passenger stations, replacing machines already at those stations, and install more machines at additional stations. The move, which expands on an agreement reached with the …

U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin on Thursday asked MasterCard Inc. to explain an obscure fee with a clunky name that the senator believes penalizes MasterCard issuers when merchants exercise their transaction-routing rights under the Durbin Amendment with MasterCard debit card purchases. But MasterCard says issuers benefit whenever its cards are used, …

• A bill by U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, to replace 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act” would hurt consumers and Main Street businesses,” the Merchants Payments Coalition said, because the measure would do away with the financial reform law’s Durbin Amendment that regulates debit card interchange and sets debit card transaction-routing requirements. …

The U.S. conversion to EMV chip cards has produced a windfall for VeriFone Systems Inc. over the past couple of years. But despite record revenues in the quarter ended April 30, delays in getting EMV equipment certified contributed to sharply lower profits and financial expectations for the leading domestic point-of-sale …