Acquiring

We couldn’t recruit David Letterman to help us with this article, but what follows are the Top 10 U.S. payments events of 2013 as identified by the Retail Payments Risk Forum, a research and industry-dialogue unit at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. 10. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized …

Target Corp. on Friday confirmed that data thieves obtained customers’ encrypted debit card PINs, but said the sensitive numbers remain useless to the criminals because of the technology masking them. ”While we previously shared that encrypted data was obtained, this morning through additional forensics work we were able to confirm …

Paul Galant, the new chief executive of payment-processing hardware and software maker VeriFone Systems Inc., says he’s committed to increasing research and development, rationalizing VeriFone’s sprawling product lines, and becoming “more nimble and more focused on our strengths.” Galant, a former senior Citigroup Inc. executive who took the helm 78 …

For more than 20 years the Electronic Transactions Association’s conference has been known as the “ETA Annual Meeting & Expo.” But next spring the merchant-acquiring industry’s biggest gathering will be known as “Transact 14: Powered by ETA.” The rebranding around the “Transact” name, according to ETA chief executive Jason Oxman, …

Mercury Payment Systems LLC may be considering a move to take the independent sales organization public. On Friday, Durango, Colo.-based Mercury issued a release disclosing it had filed a confidential draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that may presage the payment company’s public stock offering. Such …

Capping years of complex litigation, a federal court on Friday approved a controversial multibillion-dollar settlement of a class-action antitrust case challenging credit card interchange rates. With his imprimatur, Judge John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has brought apparent—but only apparent—finality to a …

Square Inc. on Monday introduced the fourth generation of its now-famous payment card reader for mobile devices. The company has added new technology and made the device 45% thinner than its 22-month-old predecessor, two factors that may reinforce Square’s message that it is the cool merchant processor, different from all …

Online commerce has hit a trifecta of sorts. New Jersey on Tuesday became the third state, in addition to Nevada and Delaware, to allow some forms of online gaming. And with its debut, more payments companies are at work on providing services to gaming operators and their users. n Registered …

An Apple Inc. job posting seeking a software engineer with expertise in payments may be an indicator of an Apple play in payments beyond its current efforts. Or, it may not. The computer and retail giant is looking for a senior software engineer to “help build a next generation payment …

In two moves to attract and retain merchants, Square Inc. on Wednesday announced that it has eliminated holds on merchant deposits as well as deposit limits on U.S. transactions, and will drop a monthly pricing plan that the mobile-payments processor says merchants didn’t like. The new deposit policy applies to …