Merchant information portals have been around for decades. They were initially designed as standalone applications that a merchant could use to track and retrieve information about customer credit card transactions, nightly batches and the source of an occasional chargeback. The information in the portal also served as a merchant’s detailed …

Separating probable success from probable failure, in four handy rules. Every October, the payments hype machine goes wild. A variety of next-great-things are about to dominate headlines and conference agendas. Most will die off quickly, so here are four rules you can use to focus in the right places: Talk …

Paycosmos, a provider of virtual and point-of-sale terminals, has teamed with payments provider linked2pay to launch “ISO in a Box,” a platform that offers sales agents support with acquiring and underwriting merchants and help with payments technology. Cashierless technology like that of Amazon Go will account for $45 billion in …

The San Francisco Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission next week will consider a $461 million contract with Cubic Transportation Systems to modernize the Clipper fare-payment system used by 22 separate transit agencies in the region. The upgrade will retain the closed-loop Clipper card that uses near-field communication for contactless fare …

Mobile POS specialist CardFlight released version 5.0 of its SwipeSimple payment-acceptance service. Among the new features are pairing receipt printers and countertop hardware for issuing receipts via a mobile printer; discount options; item images; and a virtual terminal with address-verification support. Payments provider Fattmerchant announced an integration with QuickBooks Online …

Processor First Data Corp. said it shipped its 1 millionth Clover point-of-sale sale device aimed mainly at small and mid-sized merchants; the device went to Friesen-Apotheken, a pharmacy chain based in Bad Malente, Germany. Payments platform BlueSnap has begun local processing for business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies in Australia. Buildium, a …

With mobile-payments volume increasing while confidence in passwords slumps, researchers are predicting big growth for mobile authentication via biometric technology such as facial or voice recognition. In one forecast, from the United Kingdom-based firm Juniper Research, the number of mobile users authenticating themselves by such technology will grow over the …

The mobile-payments giants Alipay and WeChat Pay  are working hard to expand acceptance outside China, and the United States is a prime market. Here’s what that could mean for U.S. merchants— and for the comparatively less successful U.S. wallets. In the four years since its launch, Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay mobile-payment …

ControlScan said its SecureEdge platform now offers PCI Data Security Essentials, a service that enables payments providers to offer a more user-friendly alternative to the traditional PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire to small businesses. Square Inc. released two ways to accept card payments, one via a computer and another using the Lightning …

Worldnet TPS Ltd. launched GoChipNow, a service for virtual-terminal merchants to convert to EMV chip card acceptance. VSoft Corp., which specializes in information-technology products for financial institutions, said it will integrate a payment service from Payrailz into its digital banking platform. Total investment in startups specializing in artificial intelligence, an …