Payments companies are taking strides toward integrating rewards for everyday purchases into mobile wallets, while making it easier to redeem those rewards at point-of-sale terminals. Last month, vending-payments specialist USA Technologies Inc. said it is integrating its MORE. loyalty platform into Apple Pay. The deal is designed to induce more …

• Merchant acquirer Square Inc. announced a promotion that waives processing costs for small businesses on more than $12,000 in Apple Pay charge volume. It will give free processing on Apple Pay transactions for small-business customers that enroll this year in a promotion that includes purchase of Square’s contactless and EMV chip card reader …

The Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force is in the final stages of reviewing 19 proposals to speed up U.S. electronic payments, Fed executives tell Digital Transactions News. The faster-payments initiative is part of the Fed’s broader Payment System Improvement project that also addresses security and efficiency issues. The Fed …

• Fifty-six percent of all bills in the U.S. are paid online at a biller, bank, or third-party site, according to data from ACI Worldwide and Aite Group. Of these, 72% are now paid at biller sites. • Digital-payments company Proxama PLC has agreed to provide payments services to clients of payment …

It’s taken about a year, but Dwolla Inc. has now executed a strategic shift away from handling online and mobile transactions directly for consumers who want to pay merchants and each other. Instead, the 8-year-old, Des Moines, Iowa-based company now focuses on selling programming to clients that want to process …

The Western Union Co. will pay $586 million to the federal government to reimburse consumers victimized by fraud as a result of the company’s allegedly lax supervision of agents and anti-fraud and money-laundering controls. The settlements announced Thursday are a result of investigations that covered payments involving the smuggling of …

• Merchant processor iPayment Inc., along with its parent company iPayment Holdings Inc., announced a refinancing with holders of its senior secured notes that company officials say should result in a “substantial deleveraging” of the company and enable it to add services and products. • Equinox Payments LLC said it supports Android Pay …

• Independent sales organization Applied Merchant Systems announced it has increased its liquidity following  an expansion of its credit line with Goldman Sachs Specialty Lending Group and Business Development Corporation of America. In conjunction, Blue Square Resolutions, also an ISO, became a shareholder in the company. • Miami-based NovoPayments, which processes payments throughout …

• The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a U.S. Department of Justice request to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel of the appellate court that, by reversing a lower-court ruling, allows American Express Co. to prevent its merchants from encouraging customers to use lower-cost forms of payment than …

• Merchant processor EVO Payments International has acquired payments-solutions specialist Sterling Payment Technologies. Paul Hunter, Sterling’s president and chief executive, will manage the Sterling unit within EVO. Terms of the deal were not announced. • An app called Clarity Money has debuted to help consumers manage their finances by performing such chores as negotiating bills, choosing …