Acquiring

With deadlines fast approaching for U.S. merchants, acquirers, and other payments players to adopt the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard, vendors are stepping forward with ideas to simplify readiness. One of the latest of these is a concept that asks why chip transactions can’t be managed by remote servers—why, in …

While some transit agencies are in the process of implementing or mulling fare systems that will accept general-purpose contactless chip cards, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and vendor Masabi US Ltd. on Monday rolled out a smart-phone ticketing app for Boston commuter-rail passengers that requires no big capital investment in …

Just when observers might have thought the mobile-acceptance market couldn’t get more crowded, merchant processor Bank of America Merchant Services LLC on Tuesday announced a service called Mobile Pay on Demand. And while the service includes the now familiar card-reading dongle for attachment to a smart phone, it also features …

While much of the payments industry’s attention is on mobile payments, mobile technology is also starting to transform the traditional retail checkout. This week, a tablet-based point-of-sale startup called ShopKeep POS launched software to keep track of employee hours and to let restaurants modify orders on the fly. Also this …

Three months after announcing their partnership, mobile-payments provider Square Inc. and coffee king Starbucks Corp. said Starbucks customers could now use the Square Wallet for purchases at 7,000 company-operated U.S. locations. The purchase process at Starbucks will be a bit different for users of the consumer-facing Square Wallet, formerly known …

With a pair of U.S patents in hand, a small, Montreal-based engineering firm may have placed itself in a position to strongly influence the fast-growing market for mobile card acceptance. The patents, awarded last month to AnywhereCommerce, cover payments via a dongle connected to a mobile device’s audio jack, a …

With a hearing coming up on Friday, objections to the proposed credit card interchange settlement are piling up in Brooklyn, N.Y., faster than debris from Superstorm Sandy. In addition to a number of retailers and their trade groups, those on record against the controversial plan forged by lawyers for the …

For years, the payments industry has hoped to see improvement in card-data security among small merchants in the U.S. But, according to a survey released last week, it’s not happening. Indeed, in some important measures, there has been backsliding on security among the nation’s smallest retailers. A little more than …

In a move that will greatly expand its business in card-not-present transaction processing, merchant processor Vantiv Inc. announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire Lowell, Mass.-based Litle & Co. for $361 million in cash. The transaction is expected to close later this year and will result in 11-year-old …

The retailers behind the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) mobile-payments initiative are united in backing the effort and remain committed to supporting only MCX for mobile payments in their stores, retail executives said during a panel discussion this week. While details surrounding how customers will use the yet-to-be-launched MCX and how …