Leading payment card processor First Data Corp. on Tuesday announced it had bought Perka Inc., a startup that provides smart-phone-based loyalty programs for merchants. The Perka buy comes just a few weeks after First Data unveiled a tablet-based point-of-sale system from Clover Network Inc., another startup that it quietly bought …

  Recurring revenue from transaction-processing fees has been a staple of independent sales organizations and acquirers for decades. But amid a host of new competitors, the payment-processing industry finds itself wondering what its next steps may be. ISOs are squeezed on one side by large players, like First Data Corp. …

Clover Network Inc., which on Wednesday burst into a crowded market for tablet-based point-of-sale systems, is betting that merchants would like to choose their apps for customer service and checkout in the same way they can load apps on their smart phones. With the new Clover Station, merchants can download …

Steve Mott Two years after Google’s splashy mobile-wallet debut, there are more wallets than ever, even though Google and others have stumbled. What’s wrong with current wallet strategies, and what kind of future do digital wallets have? If things go according to unofficial reports, the readers of this article will …

EBay Inc.’s agreement to shell out $800 million for Braintree Payments Solutions LLC, announced on Thursday, signals the online auction giant’s desire to extend its PayPal brand further into mobile commerce and in-store commerce, analysts suggest. EBay’s confirmation of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter, …

Social-media payments specialist Chirpify on Thursday introduced a service that lets marketers promote hashtags on a wide variety of media to solicit purchases. The so-called action tags can appear on TV or radio commercials, in print advertising, or on billboards and then be used on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, the …

Ronald Mazursky and Jehan HamediAn analysis of customer chatter on social media shows how the T&E giant may have to repair its new prepaid product to make it take wing. The recent announcement by American Express Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of upgrades to the Bluebird product seemingly responds to …

By Jim Daly The U.S. virtual-currency market grew 52% in 2012 and this year it could more than double to $10.9 billion in purchases, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. What’s more, virtual currency is moving beyond its online-game moorings and into more real-world settings, though …

The complexity of federal and state regulation has some operators thinking twice, including Facebook and Microsoft, both of which ditched their currencies. By Linda Punch When federal prosecutors in May shut down digital-currency network Liberty Reserve on money-laundering charges, all eyes turned to other peer-to-peer digital currencies, such as Bitcoin …

Peter Lucas Consumer frustration with checkout threatens to dampen the mobile-payments boom. Technology to the rescue? When it comes to shopping, mobile devices have untethered online consumers from the constraints of desktop and laptop computers. New York-based market-research firm eMarketer Inc. projects that this year alone sales initiated by mobile …