Acquiring

Arthur Blank & Co. Inc., a Boston-based maker of plastic payment and loyalty cards, is getting into the market for cards equipped with radio-frequency-identification technology, with ambitions particularly for cards supporting loyalty programs and payments in the quick-service retail market. “We as a company are very bullish [on RFID],” says …

Piggly Wiggly Carolina Co., a Charleston, S.C.-based supermarket chain, today switched on an in-lane biometric payment system in four stores on the way to a planned rollout of the fingerprint authentication system to all 116 stores in the chain. The system, from San Francisco-based Pay By Touch, allows customers to …

Following its agreement earlier this year with Chase Merchant Services L.L.C. for transaction-processing services, Burger King Corp. announced today it is deploying high-speed-capable card terminals in its restaurants across the country. In the past four months, it has installed VeriFone Omni 3750 devices in some 2,000 of its restaurants in …

While First Data Corp. reported strong financial results today for its second quarter, its chief executive fielded a barrage of questions on concerns that have emerged recently for the company, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.'s decision to switch its account processing from FDC to rival TSYS Inc., with the …

Mountain View Calif.-based CyberSource Corp., a transaction gateway for Internet merchants, announced today it is offering a credit-based, non-card payment alternative that can be implemented with a minimum of integration hassles. The company says an arrangement with merchant processor Paymentech L.P. will allow CyberSource merchant clients to install I4Commerce Inc.'s …

Severe price compression in the merchant acquiring market drove together two major players and led to further consolidation in the merchant-processing business as Bank of America Corp. today announced it has acquired National Processing Inc.for $1.4 billion in cash. BofA says it will combine its Merchant Services unit with NPC …

Falling technology costs and the increasing availability of more sophisticated cellular networks are driving a growing trend toward wireless point-of-sale devices, according to research from TowerGroup, a consulting and research firm in Needham, Mass. The firm's research indicates that while mobile terminals are still a small fraction of the installed …

Acies Inc., an independent sales organization based in New York, today announced it has entered into an agreement with Fort Pierce, Fla.-based Atlantic Synergy Inc., under which the ISO will become a subsidiary of Atlantic Synergy and hold a controlling interest in the company. As part the acquisition, Atlantic Synergy, …

MusicRebellion.com Inc., which operates a 3-year-old Web site selling song downloads, is getting set to adopt an updated version of a micropayments system to help handle growing volume. The Web merchant, which has been using Peppercoin Inc.'s original processing system, introduced last year, says the micropayment method accounts for between …

In an ambitious effort to capture a share of the rapidly expanding markets for both digital content and goods at the point of sale, micropayments processor Peppercoin Inc. today is announcing a second generation of the payments model it introduced commercially only last December. Considerably revised, the Waltham, Mass.-based company's …