Acquiring

Reflecting trends seen by its larger network competitors, Discover Financial Services on Monday reported modest growth in credit card volumes and bigger growth in debit. Discover, in releasing earnings for its third fiscal 2010 quarter ended Aug. 31, also said that its 4-year-old effort to recruit merchant acquirers to sign …

Another seismic merger rumbled through the merchant-acquiring industry on Wednesday when the big acquirer Fifth Third Processing Solutions LLC announced it had struck an agreement to buy Louisville, Ky.-based National Processing Co. When the deal closes, Cincinnati-based Fifth Third will have more than 420,000 merchant locations and annualized charge volume …

When eBay Inc. late last month announced it will no longer allow so-called third-party checkout services after June 30, 2011, the San Jose, Calif.-based online auctioneer’s policy shift attracted plenty of attention. Less noted was a decision, announced at the same time, to allow payment gateways other than PayPal to …

With its acquisition of mobile-terminal maker Way Systems Inc., VeriFone Systems Inc. picked up a small, struggling company facing plenty of competition in the market for mobile point-of-sale hardware and services. But the San Jose, Calif.-based terminal kingpin also bolstered a linchpin strategy in its efforts to diversify beyond POS …

While banks, card networks, and wireless carriers jockey for position in the nascent market for mobile payments at the point of sale, the digital-content business is quickly establishing itself as a fast-growing mobile-payments market. That’s thanks to the rapid spread of mobile broadband networks and smart phones, a new report …

Merchant processing is one of the bright stars in U.S. Bancorp’s firmament, and Mike Passilla, the new boss of the Minneapolis-based banking firm’s Elavon merchant-acquiring subsidiary, aims to keep payments shining. Passilla on Monday became president and chief executive of Atlanta-based Elavon, which serves 1.2 million merchants in North America …

While the payment card industry is bracing for debit card interchange and other regulations that will come next year from the Federal Reserve as a result of the new financial-reform law, merchant acquirers on Monday got a long-anticipated reporting rule. Beginning with the 2011 tax year, acquirers must report how …

Boosted by its big new merchant alliance with Bank of America Corp., First Data Corp.’s transaction count surged 41% in the second quarter, the leading payment processor reported Tuesday. Factoring out the BofA alliance, First Data’s transaction volume from existing merchants grew a much less spectacular but still respectable 9%, …

With the growing popularity of prepaid cards and other stored-value devices over the past few years, law-enforcement agencies and regulators have voiced concerns that payment devices intended for consumer convenience could become tools for money launderers, terrorists, and other illicit players. To address those concerns, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial …

Visa and MasterCard debit card issuers stand to lose up to $10.7 billion in interchange income a year in a worst-case scenario under new federal interchange controls that will take effect next year, according to a Digital Transactions News analysis. Smaller reductions are more likely as the Federal Reserve Board …