Point-of-sale integrators, help desks, and other computer-related service providers for businesses, look out—the hackers are after you. The new Global Security Report 2018 from Chicago-based Trustwave says service providers were involved in 9.5% of the 700-plus data compromises the firm investigated in 2017. In 2016, service providers played a role …

Seven months ago, our piece for this space was headlined, “So, Where Are We With Bitcoin?” The concern then was a steady climb in Bitcoin’s value and whether it constituted a bubble. The associated question was whether the cryptocurrency could ever establish itself as a means of payment, either online …

Since its founding nine years ago, Square Inc. has focused on simplified checkout options and software for small brick-and-mortar merchants. With its acquisition of Weebly Inc., announced late Thursday, San Francisco-based Square is not only staging a major expansion into e-commerce, it’s also laying the groundwork for a significant outreach …

Over the years, merchants have been continually forced to adapt to the changing needs and preferences of consumers. Now more than ever, we are living in a consumer-driven economy, and with evolving technologies, the power of the consumer has filtered all the way to the payments experience. As consumers increasingly …

Ready, a company specializing in self-pay software for restaurants, has teamed with Squirrel POS, a supplier of point-of-sale software to the same industry, to allow customers to view, split, and pay their tab on their mobile phones. Automatic Laundry, which provides laundry-management services for multitenant buildings, announced the LaundryConnect Pay …

Mastercard Inc. says it is preparing for a better online payments experience by backing the EMVCo secure remote commerce specification. Visa Inc., too, says it supports the spec. The specification, announced in November, establishes the technical framework for enabling consumers to use their payment cards across channels more easily than …

American Express Co. disclosed Monday that it will end its multi-merchant Plenti rewards program on July 10. AmEx announced the closure through a tweet on the Plenti Twitter feed and on Plenti’s Web site. “While Plenti has grown in scale since its launch, a number of factors, including shifting priorities …

LevelUp announced 25 more restaurant companies as clients of its mobile-ordering and -payment app. These include national brands Smoothie King and Zaxby’s. ParTech Inc., a vendor of point-of-sale software to the restaurant and retail industries, launched PAR Pay, an EMV-capable processing solution for credit, debit, and stored-value cards. ParTech is …

  Todd Linden, CEO of Payment Processing North America at Paysafe For a long time now, Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have supported the retail sector in providing individual merchants with the payment systems they need to meet customer demand. ISOs have provided merchants with their …

Data breaches at restaurants and hotels are nothing new, but a just-out report from Verizon Communications Inc. shows how extensively the hospitality industry gets hit by hackers. New York City-based Verizon, which besides telecommunications has a large business in investigating data breaches, says in its latest annual breach study that …