Vantiv Inc. filed a registration statement on Thursday for a proposed initial public offering of common stock that, if successful, would have a business started by Fifth Third Bancorp join the thin ranks of publicly traded processors that get most of their revenues from merchant acquiring. Vantiv, formerly known as …

  The Star EFT network, which has been working for several years on ways to enable cardholders to conduct PIN-debit transactions with online merchants, said on Thursday it will offer a service from CardinalCommerce Corp. that promises to allow issuers to choose how to authenticate users of PIN-debit cards in …

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Square Inc. on Wednesday introduced an enhancement to its Card Case wallet application that detects when a user is near a participating store and automatically links the user’s phone to the store’s Square account. By relying on this method, which the San Francisco startup calls automatically opening a tab, the …

  n At a conference call with analysts to discuss the No. 2 payment card network’s third-quarter earnings, MasterCard president and chief executive Ajay Banga said his company is offering select merchants and merchant acquirers incentives to direct debit card transactions MasterCard’s way. “We are in a completely different competitive …

Extending itself further into mobile retailing and software, VeriFone Systems Inc. on Tuesday announced it has acquired 9-year-old Global Bay Media Technologies, a South Plainfield, N.J., vendor of in-store mobile solutions. Terms of the deal, which had already closed by the time of the announcement, were not disclosed. The acquisition …

  We went out to San Francisco last month to take in X.commerce, a conference put on by eBay Inc. for its developer community. These are the people who, among other things, make payment applications work for the sellers, merchants, and processors that work with eBay and its payment entity, …

  The Concentrated World of ISOs   Reps from more than 1,200 independent sales organizations pound Main Streets, malls, and strip shopping centers in search of merchants interested in payment-processing services. That number suggests a wide-open industry, but a new study of ISOs sheds light on just how few players …

  By Lauri Giesen   The Durbin Amendment will disrupt merchant acquirers’ long-standing pricing strategies, at least temporarily. How long will the profit-padding opportunities created by Durbin last?       When retailers and their trade associations rallied in support of the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act last year, …

  By Jane Adler   The payments industry has made great strides in the area of security, but malicious computer code is still an ever-evolving threat to processors and merchants.       For a restaurant manager, Gary Sipp knows a whole lot about malicious computer software, usually referred to …