Acquiring

Funding for small businesses has been an increasingly important source of revenue for independent sales organizations and other merchant acquirers, but they’re not the only parties that have noticed the market’s lucrative potential. Now, banking-technology vendors and even large merchants are getting into the game. Jack Henry & Associates Inc., …

By Jim Daly JPMorgan Chase & Co. reported Tuesday that 60,000 merchants use its in-house ChaseNet merchant-processing venture and as of January they were generating annualized charge volume of $16 billion. Merchants in the venture include United Airlines, the Marriott hotel chain, DirecTV, 1-800 Flowers, Groupon, Zillow, and Barnes & …

Many merchant-services executives have complained for years about so-called margin compression, a relentless loss of profitability driven by competition on price per transaction. But now two researchers argue acquirer profitability, far from collapsing, is actually much better than widely thought. “There has been a lot of talk about margin compression, …

Heartland Payment Systems Inc. is building a point-of-sale system reseller network in hopes it will increase the number of multiple products sold to a single merchant. Announced Friday, the program is part of Heartland Commerce, and signals a shift in Heartland’s selling strategy. The company will no longer use a …

By Jim Daly and John Stewart Continuing its recent string of setbacks, American Express Co. Thursday lost a crucial federal court fight in which it defended policies banning merchants from steering AmEx cardholders to cheaper forms of payment. The U.S. Department of Justice and 17 state attorneys general challenged the …

Merchants using Leaf, a tablet-based point-of-sale system that its owner Heartland Payment Systems Inc. is winding down, will continue to be supported, but there will be no further sales of the system, Leaf president Sarah McCrary tells Digital Transactions News. The expense and complication of supporting hardware to accept chip …

Heartland Payment Systems Inc. has acquired point-of-sale system developers Dinerware Inc. and pcAmerica, both makers of restaurant point-of-sale systems, Heartland announced Friday. Terms were not disclosed. The acquisitions spurred Princeton, N.J.-based Heartland to create a dedicated business unit call Heartland Commerce, which includes Dinerware, pcAmercia, Xpient, Leaf, and Liquor POS. …

The PCI Security Standards Council issued a bulletin Friday saying that no version of the Secure Socket Layers (SSL) protocol for protecting Internet communications meets its definition of strong cryptography. Accordingly, the Council said it will soon revise versions 3.0 of its main Payment Card Security data-security standard and the …

Mobile point-of-sale systems have come a long way in a short time, but in one respect they may have grown up too fast. They may have outstripped the ability of merchants and merchant-service providers to provide the kind of constant and consistent support that’s necessary to keep the tablets humming. …

Fudging the numbers about their merchants’ compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) may be a common practice by merchant acquirers if findings from a new study about payment card data security are to be believed. The study by the Merchant Acquirers’ Committee, an association of more than …