Acquiring

• The number of merchants accepting chip cards increased to 1.4 million as of April 30, according to new data from MasterCard Inc. That’s a 17% increase from 1.2 million MasterCard reported in March. MasterCard also says 68% of all U.S.-issued MasterCard-branded consumer credit cards have an EMV chip. The …

Independent sales organizations, merchant acquirers, and payment facilitators catering to small-business owners who have e-commerce sites now can sell them a MasterCard Inc. service to help mitigate the risk associated with card-not-present transactions. MasterCard introduced Simplify Controls Monday, a service that includes an online dashboard and app that enables merchants …

• Wells Fargo & Co. announced its Wells Fargo Wallet will launch this summer and be incorporated into the banking giant’s mobile-banking app for Android devices, giving customers the ability to make contactless near-field communication payments directly from the app. The app, developed in-house, also will work at Wells Fargo …

• Merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems introduced Heartland Insights, a data and analytics service for restaurants that relies on the company’s point-of-sale and e-commerce solutions. Heartland recently became part of rival processor Global Payments Inc. • Canadian payments provider Beanstream expanded its service to U.S. merchants and integrated partners with …

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) said it is integrating a machine-learning engine from Featurespace that will allow the processor to generate real-time decisions on individual consumers. TSYS says the speedier fraud-control processing will help prepare its clients for the arrival of real-time payments. • Plastc Inc., which markets a …

For all the talk about independent software vendors and value-added resellers as an alternative channel for acquirers to sign up new merchants, the ISV/VAR share of the market is actually quite small, according to research released last week by Annapolis, Md.-based First Annapolis Consulting. The research does indicate, however, that …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. sued Visa Inc. on Tuesday claiming that Visa is trying to make the retailer use signature verification for some EMV debit card transactions and route those transactions over Visa’s network rather than Wal-Mart’s preferred PIN-debit networks. The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, …

The direct carrier billing business has been consolidating for the last few years, and on Monday the latest deal confirmed that surviving players are still willing to pay for volume. London-based carrier biller Bango said it had acquired a major rival, Danal Inc.’s BilltoMobile service, from San Jose, Calif.-based Danal, …

• PayPal Holdings Inc. no longer will provide purchase protection for transactions made on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, potentially dealing a blow to the nascent crowdfunding industry, CNBC reported. • In a letter to Green Dot Corp. shareholders, Harvest Capital Strategies, which owns 9.3% of Green Dot, said it …

Pricing advantages once held by super-large acquirers—those whose merchants process more than 3 million monthly credit and debit transactions—appear to have retreated, according to the Merchant Processing Pricing Benchmark Study recently issued by The Strawhecker Group. These jumbo acquirers had, on average, the lowest amounts for their processing and authorization …