By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Westernunion.com, the online and mobile-payment service of The Western Union Co., is still small, but it’s the rising star of the world’s leading wire-transfer company, which posted a $355 million fourth-quarter loss in the wake of a recent $586 million settlement with the federal government over lax …

• Independent sales organization BluePay Processing LLC announced its purchase of the merchant-services portfolio of VersaPay Corp., a business-to-business payments provider. Terms were not disclosed. • Merchant processor Total Merchant Services introduced Groovv mPOS, a mobile point-of-sale device enabling EMV and NFC contactless payments, as well as online transactions. The device links to smart …

• Financial-institution processor Fiserv Inc. said its payments segment posted adjusted revenues of $701 million in the third quarter, up 9% from $643 million a year earlier. Operating income rose 11.5% to $242 million. • Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced service changes in the U.S. and Mexico, and lower prices, involving …

• Merchant processor Payroc LLC announced it has acquired payment gateway The iTransact Group. Terms were not disclosed. Besides the gateway, the deal brings 6,000 merchants with $1.3 billion in annual volume to Payroc, along with mobile point-of-sale technology and a payment-facilitator platform. • Payments provider Intrix Technology Inc. purchased the business …

A second day of market turmoil in the wake of the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union once again took a big bite out of stocks of U.S.-based payments companies with large operations in the U.K. and Europe. For example, on a day when the major market indexes …

Shares of U.S. payments companies fell even farther than the general market Friday as the world absorbed the news from Thursday’s stunning “Brexit” vote in the United Kingdom in which British voters signaled they want to leave the European Union. Whether today’s market carnage is a sign of future long-term …

• The Merchants Payments Coalition, a Washington, D.C., lobbying group, released a new statement decrying what it calls a “poison pill” provision embedded in a bill proposed earlier this month by U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, to reform the 2010 Dodd Frank Act. The provision would repeal the debit-interchange curbs …

• U.S. senators from Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, three states where recreational marijuana use is legal, asked the various federal bank and credit-union regulatory agencies to develop joint guidance for how financial institutions could serve legal cannabis businesses; marijuana use remains illegal under federal law, meaning that many marijuana merchants …

It was a lousy December for payment stocks, but 2015 as a whole saw shares of electronic transaction processors far outperform the major market indexes, according to a new report from Chicago-based investment firm Barrington Research Associates Inc. Shares of 28 payments companies posted a mean return of 11.47% last …

Many news accounts of PayPal Holdings Inc.’s spinoff from parent company eBay Inc. noted that PayPal’s market capitalization was in the $50 billion range, but few provided context on where that placed the company among its publicly traded peers. Turns out, PayPal instantly became the fourth-largest payments player, trailing only …