With the blessing of the Federal Trade Commission and Whole Foods Market Inc. shareholders, Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday cleared the last significant hurdles in the way of its $13.7 billion deal to acquire the Austin, Texas-based chain of some 470 grocery stores. The deal, which was announced in June and …

Can the new version of 3D Secure fix the faults of the old one and stem the steady rise of e-commerce fraud? The answer is a big maybe—and here’s why. It has been nearly two decades since the card-network brands introduced 3-Domain Secure 1.0 in an attempt to offer a …

USA Technologies Inc., a provider of payment services for vending machines and other unattended merchant locations, said Tuesday the number of connections in its ePort network grew 32% year-over-year to 568,000 as of June 30, and transaction volume nearly as much. The Malvern, Pa.-based firm also reported net income of …

The political coroner has made an official pronouncement: Operation Choke Point is dead. The controversial program begun in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Justice during the administration of President Barack Obama aimed to deny payment services to fraudulent telemarketers, payday lenders, and other suspect merchants. It generated massive controversy for …

A pioneering mobile-payment wallet for mass transit has reached a milestone. Chicago’s Ventra app has been downloaded more than 2 million times since it became available in November 2015, according to an announcement Monday from Cubic Transportation Systems, the San Diego-based company that developed the app. Commuters have bought almost …

Tablet-based point-of-sale provider Revel Systems announced Thursday it will offer data-integration services from Dsync to its merchants. Australia-based Dsync provides systems-integration services that enable businesses to view disparate types of data in a single Web-based site. For example, Dsync says it can connect systems used to manage inventory, payments, e-commerce sites, …

Ziosk, a tabletop point-of-sale system owned by Tabletop Media LLC, said Wednesday that more than 100 Outback Steakhouse restaurant locations in the Southwest will use its devices. Cerca Trova Restaurant Concepts, the franchisee for Outback restaurants in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, is expanding the number of locations …

There’s some good news for U.S. debit card issuers in the form of reduced fraud rates, according to the 2017 Debit Issuer Study released Monday by Pulse, the electronic funds transfer network owned by Discover Financial Services. The fraud-loss rate for signature-debit transactions fell 30% from 2015’s 2.6 cents per …

Planet Payment Inc., a specialist processor focused on multi-currency and related international payment services, this week said it has begun “a process to explore and evaluate potential strategic alternatives focused on maximizing shareholder value,” a process that could result in the sale of the company. The review also could result …

Acquirers wanting to tap into the ever-growing number of e-commerce merchants, especially small businesses, might do well to target a handful of U.S. cities with large bases of retail entrepreneurs. E-commerce platform provider Volusion released this week a list of the top 10 cities based on volume of merchants and …