• 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 …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group is among many payments companies making announcements Monday at the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show in New York City. France-based Ingenico says its ePayments division and its research arm Ingenico Labs now offer payment-enabled messaging bots for e-commerce merchants. Bots are an artificial intelligence …

• 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 …

Contactless cards were tried in the U.S. years ago and soon fell by the wayside, giving the technology a black eye among issuers. Now a report released Monday in the U.K., where contactless is catching on fast, could revive hopes for the technology. Some 325 million debit and credit card …

• 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 …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews If loyalty programs are the key to boosting usage of new payments methods like mobile wallets, ease of rewards redemption could be even more critical. On Wednesday, terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. took a step in that direction by expanding the reach of its Points Redemption …