Transaction Processing

  Sales agents as a way to sell payment-processing services to merchants aren’t going away, but they aren’t staying the same. That’s according to a new research report from Double Diamond Group LLC, a Centennial, Colo.-based payments-advisory firm. “This is a period of significant change in acquiring,” says Rick Oglesby, …

  Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc. is moving into brick-and-mortar stores with the debut Wednesday of its Local Register mobile point-of-sale service. Similar to other mobile POS services, such as Square Inc.’s, Local Register requires merchants to create an account, purchase a card reader and download an app to a …

Defending the federal government’s guidance for providing financial services to legal marijuana businesses, a senior U.S. Treasury Department official on Tuesday said more than 100 banks and credit unions are now working with cannabis-industry customers. One consultant who connects banks with marijuana merchants confirms that financial-institution interest in the budding …

  FleetCor Technologies Inc. is buying payment processor Comdata Inc. for $3.45 billion, Norcross, Ga.-based FleetCor announced Tuesday. The deal gets FleetCor access to four businesses it is not already in, including over-the-road fleet payment services, fuel cards for national accounts, virtual payments and gift cards via Comdata’s Stored Value …

Visa Inc. on Thursday announced a new network service to flag high-risk transactions at fuel pumps, and the PCI Security Standards Council published guidance to help merchants and other organizations that handle payment card data manage their relationships with third parties to whom their outsource data-security tasks. n Visa calls …

With a major deadline arriving in October 2015, U.S. payments players are expected to be busy in the coming months converting systems to be compliant with the Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card standard. But with liability for counterfeit card fraud shifting in 14 months to the party not prepared for EMV, how …

Target Corp. on Tuesday issued an update on its data-breach expenses for the second quarter that brings total costs to $236 million, including expenses in the first quarter and late 2013. The Minneapolis-based retailer expects gross breach-related expenses in the second quarter to be $148 million, offset by $38 million …

Top executives at MasterCard Inc. on Thursday trumpeted the card network’s gains with MasterPass, its digital wallet, and downplayed the impact of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s ongoing conversion to Visa Inc. Introduced two years ago, MasterPass is now operating in 10 countries with “tens of thousands” of merchants and will …

  Vantiv Inc.’s $1.65 billion acquisition in May of Mercury Payment Systems LLC appears to be paying off already. In the second quarter, Cincinnati-based Vantiv said Mercury accounted for approximately 5% of the payment processor’s net revenue growth. Vantiv’s second-quarter revenue increased 11.6% to $331.3 million from $296.9 million a …

The big merchant acquirer TransFirst Inc. gave notice Wednesday that it is planning a partial initial public offering. Hauppauge, N.Y.-based TransFirst filed a registration statement, or S-1, with the Securities and Exchange Commission announcing its IPO plans and putting a tentative value of $100 million on the deal. The filing says …