By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews The lingering impact of some retailers’ slow conversion to EMV chip card acceptance continued to plague prepaid card services provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. in the fourth quarter. Blackhawk reported late Wednesday that revenues fell short of its expectations in part because of a “continued EMV headwind” …

• First Data Corp. expanded its deal with ShopKeep, a cloud-based point-of-sale provider, that makes ShopKeep’s POS software available through its distribution network. ShopKeep also will incorporate First Data’s payment processing and security tools. This includes the Clover Go software developer kit and enables ShopKeep software to operate on Clover hardware. • …

Small merchants that belong to the 109,000-member Canadian Federation of Independent Business will get interchange reductions of 12.5% or more on Mastercard purchases beginning April 3 under a deal announced Thursday by the CFIB and Mastercard Inc. The new rates will be available to CFIB members through all Canadian merchant …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Merchant-services provider Cayan released a semi-integrated mobile-payment device that accepts EMV chip card payments, the Boston-based company announced Tuesday. Dubbed Genius Handheld, the device enables clerks to accept multiple forms of payment while standing in a store aisle or at a popup location to shorten checkout queues. …

• E-commerce platform provider Shopify Inc. said it added 133,000 merchants in 2016, bringing the total to 377,500 by year’s end; gross merchandise volume hit $5.5 billion in the fourth quarter, up 94% from a year earlier. Shopify also says that since it launched Apple Pay for the Web, more than …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling to keep up with online stores, but they’d struggle far less if they could better deploy in-store technology, according to a report issued Tuesday. A big issue for shoppers is lackluster customer service, which last year cost retailers $150 billion in lost …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews How enthusiastic are consumers about shopping on their smart phones and tablets? Enough that mobile commerce grew to $22.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2016, up 45% from $15.6 billion in the same period a year prior, says comScore Inc., a Reston, Va.-based data-measurement firm. That …

Leading payment processor First Data Corp. on Monday reported positive net income for the fourth quarter and all of 2016, a turnaround from losses for both periods a year earlier, but it’s still working to improve mediocre revenue growth in its merchant-acquiring business. Atlanta-based First Data posted net income of …

• PayPal Holdings Inc. reported in a filing that it has received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice “seeking the production of certain information related to our historical anti-money laundering program.” PayPal said it is cooperating with the DoJ and cannot predict the outcome of the government’s investigation. • A point-of-sale software …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews For more than six years, most of the debate about the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment has been relatively straightforward. Merchants like Durbin because they pay less in debit card acceptance costs under the amendment’s interchange price cap affecting card issuers with more than $10 billion in assets. …