Acquiring

The mysterious Square Inc. payment service made a name for itself Monday by joining a somewhat exclusive club of companies to offer the first applications for Apple Inc.'s iPad notepad computer within a couple of days of the iPad's much-hyped April 3 debut. Square also revealed its pricing. San Francisco-based …

Transaction Network Services Inc. this week announced its entry in what is becoming an increasingly crowded market?applications that let smart phones act as credit and debit card acceptance devices. But TNS, which specializes in providing the transaction-transport systems for point-of-sale and ATM networks, says it will set itself apart by …

Merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc.'s sales force will begin selling the company's new end-to-end encryption system in the second quarter following testing that began last June, the company says. Heartland also says several terminal manufacturers are integrating the technological protocols of its system, which was developed by Voltage Security …

Growing independent sales organization FrontStream Payments Inc. made another deal last week that could be a sign that merger-and-acquisition activity in the merchant-acquiring industry is warming up after a recession-induced chill. The transaction also illustrates that private-equity firms see the merchant-acquiring space as a fertile ground for new investments. In …

The merchant-acquirer encryption and tokenization train picked up speed this week when Fifth Third Processing Solutions, one of the nation's biggest payment processors, announced it would offer its merchants end-to-end encryption and tokenization systems for protecting cardholder data. Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Processing's technology comes from Voltage Security Inc., the Palo …

Discover Financial Services now has more than 100 bank card merchant acquirers booking small to medium-sized merchants for its network, the company reported today at an investor presentation in New York City. Discover predicts that those acquirers will enable Discover acceptance in 97% of their new merchant sales in 2010's …

With the economy still shaky, some established online merchants are branching into new product lines in search of incremental revenue, and that can create problems if the merchants don't work closely with their acquirers, Bob Nadeau, group executive at Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, tells Digital Transactions News. In a wide-ranging …

Interchange regulation of the kind being advocated by national merchant groups just isn't getting much traction on Capitol Hill. In the latest example, the National Retail Federation on Monday issued a statement saying it was disappointed that U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd's much-awaited proposal for regulatory reform in …

Michael D. Capellas, the former Compaq Computer Corp. and MCI chief executive who became chairman and chief executive at First Data Corp. in September 2007 when private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. took the huge processor private, is taking a new position at KKR. Replacing him as chairman and …

Getting an annual assessment to determine their compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard costs big merchants an average of $225,000, but some pay $500,000 or more and others much less, according to a new research report by Ponemon Institute LLC. The report also says that only about 2% …