• MasterCard Inc. issued its latest U.S. EMV progress report; the network says it has 2 million chip-active merchant locations and that 88% of MasterCard consumer credit cards now have chips.
• Processor Elavon announced it is launching a tablet-based point-of-sale product in Canada in conjunction with talech, a POS software developer.
• Payments company iPayment Holdings Inc. announced its partner program has expanded into the unattended payments vertical.
• One of the two taxicab companies in Anchorage, Alaska, is asking the Anchorage Assembly, the municipality’s legislative body, to approve a $1 fee on credit and debit card fares; a local transportation commission rejected the proposal in May.
• NCR Corp. said Rutter’s Farm Stores, a convenience store operator, is using NCR’s OPTIC, an outdoor payment terminal that enables EMV and magnetic-strip card acceptance in addition to contactless payments. Rutter has 65 locations.
• Mobile-payment technology provider Net Element Inc. said its PayOnline module is now available on 19 online platforms for e-commerce and content management system (CMS) functions, including WordPress, Joomla and 1C-Bitrix.
• Fraud-prevention specialist Kount Inc. said it received two U.S. patents on data protection measures it developed.