Acquiring

American Express Co. made no pricing concessions to Walgreen's Co. to keep the pharmacy giant accepting AmEx cards, a top executive says. Responding to questions from securities analysts during a conference call yesterday to discuss AmEx's fourth-quarter and year-end 2004 results, Gary L. Crittenden, chief financial officer at the New …

Discover Financial Services Inc.'s deal with GE Consumer Finance Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will lead to a huge volume boost for Discover and help the Riverwoods, Ill.-based company offer pricing to potential issuing partners that exceeds the interchange income they can get from Visa and MasterCard, an expert observer …

Two key results of First American Payment Systems L.P.'s acquisition of National Data Funding Corp.?consummated late last year and announced last week?are that First American gains an inhouse facility for wireless, Internet Protocol-based transaction processing while R. Scott Hatfield, one of NDFC's long-time owners, can now devote himself full-time to …

Pharmacy giant Walgreen's Co., which a month ago announced it would stop accepting American Express cards effective today, has reversed itself, announcing it will continue taking AmEx cards after reaching a new multi-year deal with the card company. Terms of the new arrangement were not released. “We were able to …

Sovereign Bank has renewed a merchant-processing contract with First Data Corp., the Denver-based processor has announced. The five-year deal represents an extension of Sovereign Merchant Services, which was established in 2001 as one of a number of alliance agreements First Data has concluded with banks in which FDC provides merchant-transaction …

Nashville, Tenn.-based independent sales organization iPayment Inc. expects on Friday to close on its $130 million cash acquisition of a merchant portfolio from First Data Corp. The portfolio consists of 25,000 small merchant accounts generating $9 billion to $10 billion in annual card volume. First Data Merchant Services will continue …

Paymentech L.P. is breaking into the market for small-value transactions with an agreement it announced today with Pepsi Cola North America to process credit and debit card payments at vending machines. Pepsi bottlers have deployed “several hundred” machines in high-traffic locations in the U.S., such as malls, hotels, and casinos, …

Leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Inc. has announced it is buying GO Software from Return On Investment Corp. for $13 million in a deal expected to close next month. With the acquisition, San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone expands its presence in the market made up of so-called integrated point-of-sale devices, such …

Nashville, Tenn.-based iPayment Inc. this morning said it has appointed White & Case as its counsel of record in litigation in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles, in which it and certain of its officers and directors are defendants against allegations of fraud. The processor also repeated earlier assertions it …

Paradata Systems Inc. is getting set to build up its market share in Internet-based transaction processing in the U.S. To that end, it has added two U.S.-based transaction-processing veterans to its board and is starting to seek out larger independent sales organizations and other resellers to more rapidly expand its …