The week started out on a fusion theme when a private-equity firm said it would buy Canadian payments and financial software developer DH Corp. for C$4.8 billion ($3.6 billion) and merge it with one of its portfolio companies, United Kingdom-based Misys, a software provider for retail and corporate banking. Also …

• Payments provider Clearent LLC completed its purchase of Payment Alliance International’s Merchant Services Division. The deal expands Clearent’s annual processing volume to $14 billion. • International payment-services provider Planet Payment Inc. reported that it processed a total of 191.6 million settled transactions in 2016, down 16% from 227.5 million transactions in …

If creating faster-payment systems is like putting pieces of a puzzle together, another piece was added Wednesday when payment technology provider ACI Worldwide Inc. announced that processor Jack Henry & Associates Inc. will use ACI’s UP Immediate Payments service to connect its community-bank and credit-union clients to the new real-time …

• Punchh, provider of mobile loyalty systems for restaurants, has introduced a chatbot that allows customers to “converse” with dining clients on Facebook Messenger, Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa, and other platforms. Punchh says the chatbot integrates “quickly and easily” with existing point-of-sale, loyalty, and ordering programs. • Royal Bank of Canada said …

• U.K.-based merchant-processing giant Worldpay Group Plc reported its U.S. revenue, which accounts for more than a quarter of its total revenue, increased 15.5% to $299 million in 2016, though the company pointed to weakness in its U.S. business that hurt its overall performance. Average U.S. transaction value declined 2.2% to …

• Merchant processor Harbortouch Payments LLC said it will integrate cloud-based purchasing and inventory-control software from Sarbari into its point-of-sale offering for the restaurant industry. • Processor and payments-tech developer Dwolla Inc. said it has brought its application programming interface for same-day automated clearing house transactions out of pilot. With this move, …

Mobile order-ahead-and-pay functionality has been adopted lately by restaurants ranging from Starbucks Corp. to Chick-fil-A. But with the announcement on Wednesday by McDonald’s Corp. that it will offer the service on its mobile app, the world’s largest hamburger chain could finally push mobile payments into the consumer mainstream. At an …

• A small group of protesters came to the Ottawa, Ontario, headquarters of e-commerce services provider Shopify Inc. Thursday to deliver a stack of 140,000 signatures from people opposed to Shopify’s business dealings with alt-right news service Breitbart News, which runs its Web store on Shopify’s platform. • Roberts Hawaii, a tour-bus and airport-shuttle …

• McDonald’s Corp. is adding order-ahead and payment features to its mobile app as part of a new global growth strategy; mobile order and pay will be enabled in 20,000 restaurants in the U.S. and other countries by year’s end, the fast-food giant giant said. • Dwolla Inc. has introduced Transfer, …

Circle Internet Financial has moved beyond Bitcoin to social payments. But its ambitions don’t stop there. Bitcoin remains a financial-services buzzword. But it’s becoming more and more clear that the cryptocurrency will be relegated to back-office processes outside the consumer’s awareness. Seeing this movement, Jeremy Allaire, founder and chief executive …