In a deal that could have important implications for payments providers like Square Inc. and Stripe Inc., the United Kingdom’s SumUp Inc. early Thursday announced it has acquired Fivestars Loyalty Inc., a San Francisco-based payment facilitator for some 12,000 small businesses. The acquisition, SumUp’s first in the U.S. market, calls …

Fortis Payment Systems LLC is the latest acquirer to build up its integrated payments position, announcing Wednesday the acquisitions of EpicPay International LLC and Change Merchant Solutions LLC. The two deals will boost Fortis’s options for independent software vendors and developers, the company says. “Technology partners will be able to …

Veteran payments practitioners will recall that, “in the beginning,” issuers paid interchange to merchants to incent them to accept credit card payments from the incipient Visa and Mastercard networks.  By the inception of electronic draft capture (circa 1980), that acceptance was growing to a critical-mass level nationwide, and by the late …

The now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t shuffle of interchange-rate changes planned for April may have betrayed a rare introspective moment at the payment networks—which are long used to imposing their fees and rules on the rest of the payments ecosystem at will. And that makes it hard to resist wondering what might be …

There has now been a year of pandemic, but also of regulation, litigation, and malfeasance in the payments business. What’s going on, and has anything really changed? Like everyone else in the “Time of Covid,” the people of payments woke up just about every day last year wondering what new …

Lawsuits brought by merchants against Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. have become almost routine for the two network giants, but now they face an unusual action—a suit from Intuit Inc., which is not only a card-accepting merchant but also an independent sales organization and payment facilitator. Filed Feb. 19 in …

You may have read last month that the huge Web domain registrar and hosting service GoDaddy is buying a POS terminal startup called Poynt. The deal calls for $320 million in cash upfront and another $45 million in cash down the road. That’s not a bad payday for a company …

GoDaddy Inc.’s agreement to buy Poynt Co., announced late Tuesday, will broaden GoDaddy’s focus into payment services for online merchants and could make the Web-services company a key player in merchant acquiring, observers and company executives say. The deal, in which GoDaddy has agreed to pay $320 million in cash …

The Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. said it is seeking participants for a newly-formed a study group on faster and real-time payments. The ASC X9 develops national and international standards for the financial-services industry.Payments-technology provider Payfacto Payments Inc. has partnered with Community Federal Savings Bank to launch a merchant-acquiring unit for the U.S. market …

Visa Inc. on Wednesday announced the rollout in 15 geographic markets of Visa Tap to Phone, which allows consumers to initiate a transaction simply by tapping a contactless card to a merchant’s NFC-enabled mobile device.  Tap to Phone is now live in numerous countries throughout Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia …