• 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 …

• Processing-software vendor Womply has launched an analytics tool called Retention Intelligence to help acquirers identify merchants likely to leave the portfolio. • A 2-year-old startup called diningData, which processes payments and analyzes data for restaurants, announced it is now handling $1 billion in annual volume. The company is a division of Hadfield …

• Payments provider Dwolla Inc. announced a $6.85 million round of funding led by Union Square Ventures and Foundry Group. The funds will be used to expand sales and account-management operations at the company’s Des Moines, Iowa office. Dwolla also said it is moving its white-label products into a new collection of application …

• Mastercard Inc. and investor and philanthropist George Soros announced plans “to explore private-sector solutions to societal challenges” by possibly creating a so-called social enterprise called Humanity Ventures that will apply commercial strategies to address such problems as joblessness and lack of access to health care and education. Soros might …

• The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has accepted in principle a number of proposals Mastercard Inc. has made to dispel concerns the agency expressed earlier this month about the planned $920 million merger of Mastercard and the U.K.-based payments-technology firm VocaLink. The CMA had been concerned that the merger would hand Mastercard …

• 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 …

• Payment technology provider MagTek Inc. introduced tDynamo, a compact terminal that accepts chip and magnetic-stripe payment cards as well as contactless transactions in either fixed or mobile configurations. • USA Technologies Inc. said its ePort Connect Platform’s G0-S series has been certified on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network. USAT’s ePort devices …

• Bank of America Corp. reported combined credit and debit card purchase volume of $134.3 billion in the fourth quarter, up 4% from $129.5 billion a year earlier and up 6% when adjusted for earlier divestitures. • Wells Fargo & Co. reported debit card purchase volume of $78.4 billion in the fourth …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Bank and non-bank players alike are scrambling to claim a share of the peer-to-peer payments market, and a report released this week explains why: adoption is hot and getting hotter. Slightly more than one-third of U.S. consumers made at least one transaction last year, up from …

• More than 100 new merchants have signed a letter to U.S. House of Representatives leaders, bringing the total to 768 since the letter began circulating in November, urging them not to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment, which put a cap on debit card interchange and set debit transaction-routing requirements. Dodd-Frank is …