Acquiring

  A recent Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities’ advisory about potentially requiring independent sales organizations and processors to obtain money-transmitter licenses could pose problems for the payments industry. “It’s the wrong execution of the right idea,” Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Electronic Transactions Association, …

  If consumer adoption of mobile payments is going to break past its current low rate, purveyors of the services will have to find new ways of making m-payments faster and more convenient to use, and attractive for merchants to accept. That’s the assessment from Derek Francom, director of PayPal …

The latest forecast for mobile payments at the point of sale echoes what many other studies have said, which is that current volume is minuscule. But a convergence of forces, including mobile wallets coming preloaded with more and more smart phones and more point-of-sale terminals being able to accept new …

Now that merchant acquirers, and, by extension, merchants, are liable for certain kinds of fraud losses if the merchants aren’t prepared for EMV chip cards, acquirers are starting to put in place EMV non-compliance fees to cover their new risk exposure. One of the first to move on this is …

VeriFone Systems Inc. on Thursday introduced a new point-of-sale terminal product line that embraces design cues from consumer electronics. With the new terminal line, VeriFone also introduced its first app store. Dubbed Engage, the series of six devices, which includes two countertop terminals, two PIN pads, and two portable devices, …

For merchants these days, laying hands on a payment terminal with the needed EMV certifications is hard enough. Finding a certified device with built-in intelligence is even harder. Against that backdrop, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup called Poynt Co. on Thursday announced its Poynt Smart Terminal is the first such …

Top performing merchant acquirers make more than 103 basis points per transaction from merchants that process with them. That’s the finding from a survey of 37 independent sales organizations and acquirers conducted by Adil Consulting, an Omaha, Neb.-based payments-advisory firm. The median is 64 basis points. The top 20% of …

Implementing EMV chip card payments can be anything but a cheap and easy plug-and-play for small businesses, according to testimony several merchants gave before a U.S. House of Representatives committee Wednesday. Art Potash, chief executive of Potash Markets, a 65-year-old family-run Chicago grocery operation with three stores, told the House …

  First Data Corp.’s push to transform itself into a nimbler and more responsive payments processor continues on, with changes in its internal structure and approach to servicing merchants leading the way, says a First Data executive. In an interview Thursday with Digital Transactions News, Dan Charron, First Data executive …

  Add TransFirst Holdings Inc. to the growing roster of payments companies turning to the publicly traded stock markets to raise cash. The big merchant acquirer late Friday announced it filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of stock. The filing, …