With interchange costs ravaging their balance sheets, most merchants will tell you they’d far rather take cash than cards. Not Split Bread. In fact, the San Francisco sandwich shop doesn’t just discourage cash, it plain won’t accept it. Cards only, please. “Cash is expensive,” David Sliverglide, chief executive of Split …

Clover Network Inc., which on Wednesday burst into a crowded market for tablet-based point-of-sale systems, is betting that merchants would like to choose their apps for customer service and checkout in the same way they can load apps on their smart phones. With the new Clover Station, merchants can download …

  CardFree, a mobile-wallet startup founded by payments-industry veterans with experience in mobile-payments apps, says its first merchant partner is Sonic Drive-In, a quick-serve restaurant chain with more than 3,500 locations. CardFree features a geo-location app to identify the consumer’s proximity to the merchant for marketing purposes. The company, which …

The deployment, which is expected to start later this year, is being characterized by both companies as a national rollout rather than a pilot. Paydiant’s Chris Gardner, a co-founder of the Wellesley, Mass.-based company, refers deployment questions to Subway, which refuses to comment beyond the companies’ joint press release. The …

Steve Mott Two years after Google’s splashy mobile-wallet debut, there are more wallets than ever, even though Google and others have stumbled. What’s wrong with current wallet strategies, and what kind of future do digital wallets have? If things go according to unofficial reports, the readers of this article will …

Critics say state-by-state money-transfer licenses deter payments startups and entrench incumbents. Defenders say they protect the public. What’s really going on? By Jim Daly Christopher Ferro, who heads up legal and compliance operations at digital wire-transfer company Xoom Corp., was pleased. It was Sept. 5, and he had just opened …

Mark Horwedel Heavy costs, unrealistic deadlines, and a looming threat to hard-won Durbin rights are just some of the reasons. The bottom line is the chip card standard badly needs an overhaul. This question posed by the headline on this article seems to come up with increasing frequency these days, …

The key to success is to understand that small merchants are really more like consumers than like businesses, and act accordingly, says Adil Moussa. The acquiring industry keeps acting like it is in the business-to-business field. The result is their messages to small merchants are missing the mark. Adil Moussa …

At first glance, it looks like a lopsided collaboration between competitors, but the agreement by which mobile point-of-sale upstart Square Inc. will integrate Intuit Inc.’s popular QuickBooks accounting software may end up benefiting both parties equally, some observers say. Under the deal, announced on Tuesday, users of the Square Register …

Google Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new mobile app for its Google Wallet that emphasizes the wallet’s loyalty and person-to-person payments features that in the past had taken a back seat to its point-of-sale payment capability based on near-field communication (NFC) technology. The app is now available to all smart …