Square Inc., which debuted more than seven years ago pursuing micromerchants with a free card reader, launched Square Register, a $999 point-of-sale system designed for larger merchants, it announced Monday. Square Register is a full-sized POS device that has merchant-facing and consumer-facing screens. Also available at $49 a month for …

Point-of-sale system provider Revel Systems announced it is working with mobile-payments provider LevelUp to integrate mobile order-ahead, in-store mobile payments, and loyalty service for Revel’s restaurant clients. After more than 50 years in the Houston area, First Data Corp.’s TeleCheck Services unit will vacate its headquarters in suburban Sugar Land, …

Contactless payments got a big boost Wednesday when the New York City area’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority approved a $539.5 million contract with San Diego-based Cubic Transportation Systems to install a near-field communication-based payment system across all MTA transit and commuter-rail systems that includes open-loop payments. The deal means MTA riders …

A Cincinnati-based startup called LISNR is promoting technology that transmits payment data over sound waves. The technology, which the company demonstrated Tuesday at the Money 20/20 financial-technology conference in Las Vegas, is now open for beta and can be used as an alternative to near-field communication, the company said. It …

The PCI Security Standards Council is without a general manager as the organization that establishes electronic-payments security standards prepares to go in a new direction with its leadership. Out is Stephen W. Orfei, who joined the council in 2014 as general manager and replaced Bob Russo, the council’s original G.M. …

Despite non-stop news reports about data breaches, Americans over the past year have gotten sloppier about their usage of passwords to protect their financial accounts online. That’s the word from research firm Aite Group LLC and Visa Inc., which recently announced results of their second annual Global Security Engagement Scorecard …

Mobile payments in the United States haven’t grown as fast as program sponsors had thought they would, and now the industry is looking at what the reasons might be. After all, the payment method is positioned to consumers as a faster, easier, more secure alternative to cards, and one that …

Private-equity firm GTCR, which bought Sage Payment Solutions in August from its British parent company The Sage Group plc, appointed veteran independent sales organization executive Joe Kaplan as chief executive of the merchant processor, and also announced that it would invest $350 million to support Sage. Kaplan is the former …

Almost as many merchants—65%—seek to increase transaction volumes by reducing identity verification thresholds as do those—74%—that try to reduce fraudulent transactions through more effective verification methods. That quandary surfaced in the “Lost in Transaction Vol. II” report released Thursday by Paysafe Group plc. With a focus on fraud, including consumer …

Issuers, merchants, and processors all share the same dilemma when attempting to authenticate an online identity. They are bedeviled by personally identifiable information easily accessible to criminals that they can use to spoof authentic consumers. In response, Visa Inc. on Thursday announced the Visa ID Intelligence service, which it says …