It might be a cliché, but the saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same has some validity for merchant acquirers despite the rapid introduction of new technologies and the entrance of new competitors in recent years. For example, the top 10 U.S. merchant acquirers in …

Citigroup Inc. on Wednesday announced it has struck a definitive agreement to sell its institutional Prepaid Card Services unit to Munich, Germany-based Wirecard AG. The deal is significant in that it will give Europe’s second-largest payment processor a toehold in the U.S., and it marks the retreat by another big …

With the April 18 tax-filing deadline bearing down, a new cash-payment option from the Internal Revenue Service and payment processors PayNearMe and Official Payments lets consumers pay federal income taxes in cash at 7-Eleven convenience stores—and if there’s any money left, they can ease the pain with a Slurpee. PayNearMe, …

Payment processors Square Inc. and First Data Corp. made headlines in 2015’s market for initial public offerings of stock, but neither company was a standout, according to recent market reviews. In fact, a new analysis by PitchBook, a Seattle-based provider of a data-analysis platform for venture-capital and other financial firms, lists …

  Add TransFirst Holdings Inc. to the growing roster of payments companies turning to the publicly traded stock markets to raise cash. The big merchant acquirer late Friday announced it filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of stock. The filing, …

By John Stewart Payments-processing titan First Data Corp. on Thursday launched its long-awaited effort to go public with an initial offering of stock that would value the company at as much as $17.6 billion and raise as much as $3.2 billion. The IPO could well be the largest seen on …

Funding for small businesses has been an increasingly important source of revenue for independent sales organizations and other merchant acquirers, but they’re not the only parties that have noticed the market’s lucrative potential. Now, banking-technology vendors and even large merchants are getting into the game. Jack Henry & Associates Inc., …

Remember 3D Secure? You may be forgiven if you don’t. The password-based technology was all the rage a decade ago as online merchants sought ways to control fraud. But it proved hard to integrate, and merchants complained it interfered too much with customers’ checkout sessions, so it never really caught …

Some 400,000 small merchants now accept American Express Co. payment cards through the OptBlue program that AmEx announced nearly a year ago. OptBlue enables bank card merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations to offer AmEx acceptance to small businesses and set the pricing through a one-stop-shopping option when they sell …

Card-not-present fraud is the bane of any merchant that operates an e-commerce site, and EMVCo, a standards body for the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) specification, hopes its newly assumed oversight of the 3D Secure authentication standard can help them. Operated as Visa Inc.’s Verified by Visa and MasterCard Inc.’s SecureCode, 3D Secure …