The merchant-acquiring industry might soon get another publicly traded company should independent sales organization Mercury Payment Systems Inc. follow through on plans to sell a minority stake in the company. n Mercury Payment Systems Inc.’s operating subsidiary, Mercury Payment Systems LLC, currently is 62% owned by an affiliate of private-equity …

  Patience is not an online virtue for consumers, and, it appears, for merchants waiting for online approval of their payment-processing account applications. At least that’s the assessment of Tom Dailey, chief executive of 2Checkout, a Columbus, Ohio-based e-commerce payment-services company, which announced this week it has revised its underwriting …

Hoping to build off its security reputation, The Brink’s Company announced Tuesday it launched Brink’s Checkout, an e-commerce payment service in conjunction with 2Checkout.com Inc., an e-commerce payment-services company. The famed armored-car company will market and sell Brink’s Checkout, while 2Checkout will provide the payment processing, oversee the merchant application …

The recent announcement that U.S. Bancorp would issue American Express-branded credit cards brings yet another big domestic bank into American Express Co.’s network of third-party issuers under a strategy AmEx uses to build transaction volume. AmEx had 77 so-called Network Card License (NCL) arrangements with banks worldwide at the end …

Jim Daly Data-breach insurance has become a mainstream product in the merchant-acquiring business, but some executives say PCI compliance and diligent security practices negate the need to buy coverage. What’s next? The unnerving reality that credit and debit card-accepting merchants and their processors can have their computer systems hacked spawned …

Investors may be disappointed with Apple Inc. in the wake of that tech giant’s introduction of two new iPhone models, but they’re plenty happy with digital wire-transfer company Xoom Corp. San Francisco-based Xoom on Tuesday raised $85.6 million in a new stock offering, about $20 million more than it expected …

Linda Punch Time was, regulators largely left independent sales organizations and other acquirers alone. Now, with a trio of major enforcement actions, the Federal Trade Commission is showing how those days are over. For entities that play such a key role in the acquiring industry, independent sales organizations have led …

A growing feeling among independent sales organizations about more eyes looking over their shoulders came through Thursday at the annual conference of the MidWest Acquirers Association, a regional trade group. Jitters over the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuits against ISOs that processed for allegedly fraudulent telemarketers to increasing worries about data …

Sometimes news developments turn certain types of merchants into public-relations and political hot potatoes for their payment processors, forcing merchant acquirers to decide whether they want to continue serving them. Despite strong sales, firearms merchants are one such category today, thanks to several mass shootings in the past two years, …

The number of consumers buying stuff in stores using their mobile devices nearly tripled last year. But the Federal Reserve, which came up with that factoid, cautions mobile-payments enthusiasts not to whoop it up too much because the increase in mobile payors is not statistically significant. The Fed’s finding came …