In this age of mobile payments, online commerce, and millions of places to use plastic payment cards, cash remains highly relevant and popular with consumers, the nation’s leading retailer ATM network insists. Houston-based Cardtronics Inc. on Thursday released results of a survey showing that consumers use cash far more than …

In the face of reports of generally mediocre mobile-wallet usage, a report issued this week indicates the picture may brighten soon. Thirty-nine percent of consumers have used a mobile-payments service in a store within the past year, and 73% of these have done so just within the past three months, …

Confirming rumors that have been rife for days, merchant acquirer Global Payments Inc. announced late Tuesday that it will buy smaller rival Heartland Payment Systems Inc. in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $4.3 billion. At $100 per share, the deal represents an 18% premium over Heartland’s closing share price Tuesday. …

Consumer shopping during the Thanksgiving-holiday weekend increased 9.4%, almost tripling the growth rate last year, according to card-transaction data released by First Data Corp. In 2014, the holiday-shopping weekend grew by 3.5% over 2013. The Atlanta-based processor analyzed the volume of transactions made at more than 820,000 merchant locations that …

Prepaid card issuer and services provider Green Dot Corp. on Thursday said it is over the hump of business lost when it closed its popular MoneyPak reload product early this year. MoneyPak was a long-established product that Pasadena, Calif.-based Green Dot sold in stores to enable the reloading of prepaid …

Offering value-added services and focusing on the right merchant categories can boost profits and take the sting out of portfolio attrition. Talk of margin compression is nothing new for merchant acquirers. The ongoing race for merchants between acquirers, independent sales organizations, and merchant aggregators has led many players into a …

Funding is pouring into payments technology at a furious rate. Now startups and established firms alike are wondering: How long can it last, and what’s the long-term impact? If one thing is certain about the six years or so that have passed since the financial crisis, it’s that nobody can …

Merchants like to gripe about the cost of payment card interchange and processing expenses, but relatively few have done a close analysis of what it really costs to accept the various tender types, according to an Aite Group LLC researcher. If they did, most would conclude that debit cards are …

Like their brethren in Colorado, the new marijuana stores in the state of Washington will be operating mostly on a cash basis, but operators hope that the federal government eventually will remove obstacles preventing them from getting payment card merchant accounts and business checking accounts. On Monday, the Washington State …

The merchant cash-advance and non-bank small-business loan sectors have boomed in recent years, with startups, established providers, and PayPal Inc. all seeking to tap merchant demand for capital that banks haven’t met. Now comes merchant processor Square Inc. with a new merchant cash-advance (MCA) service called Square Capital. As it …