Four regional automated clearing house associations in the South will merge Jan. 1 under the name of PaymentsFirst Inc. The merger may be the biggest one yet among regional ACH associations in terms of participants and furthers the long-standing trend of smaller, mostly state-based ACH organizations pooling their resources as …

Merchant acquirer and payment-technology developer Merchant Warehouse is adding PayPal acceptance to its Genius point-of-sale platform, the Boston-based company announced Monday. Merchant Warehouse’s Genius system enables merchants to accept payments and to manage services like loyalty, mobile commerce, gift, and rewards programs. PayPal is activated remotely, requiring no action by merchants. …

Top executives at MasterCard Inc. on Thursday trumpeted the card network’s gains with MasterPass, its digital wallet, and downplayed the impact of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s ongoing conversion to Visa Inc. Introduced two years ago, MasterPass is now operating in 10 countries with “tens of thousands” of merchants and will …

  Vantiv Inc.’s $1.65 billion acquisition in May of Mercury Payment Systems LLC appears to be paying off already. In the second quarter, Cincinnati-based Vantiv said Mercury accounted for approximately 5% of the payment processor’s net revenue growth. Vantiv’s second-quarter revenue increased 11.6% to $331.3 million from $296.9 million a …

The big merchant acquirer TransFirst Inc. gave notice Wednesday that it is planning a partial initial public offering. Hauppauge, N.Y.-based TransFirst filed a registration statement, or S-1, with the Securities and Exchange Commission announcing its IPO plans and putting a tentative value of $100 million on the deal. The filing says …

Square Inc. on Wednesday ended months of speculation with an announcement that it will begin offering an EMV card reader early next year. Square will start taking orders for the device, which will process chip-and-signature as well as mag-stripe transactions, later this year, the San Francisco-based company said. The move comes …

Zooz Mobile Ltd. is preparing to launch in September a transaction-routing engine that will let so-called omnichannel merchants run payments for e-commerce, mobile commerce, and in-store commerce through a single pipe. The engine, tentatively called the Omnichannel Generator, will seek out the optimal path for each transaction, allowing merchants to …

Amazon.com Inc. on Monday refused to comment on a report that the big online retailer is preparing to launch a mobile card reader to compete with Square Inc., PayPal Inc., and dozens of other vendors. “We can’t comment on rumors and speculation,” an Amazon.com spokesperson told Digital Transactions News by …

  Merchant groups and payment-industry members both want to use tokenization to make it tougher for criminals to get to sensitive cardholder data, but a disagreement has erupted about the best way to do that. On Monday, the Food Marketing Institute, Merchant Advisory Group, National Association of Convenience Stores, National …

The arms race in the tablet-based point-of-sale market heated up on Friday with Zing’s launch of its Register application. Built for Apple Inc.’s iPad, the software-as-a-service product includes integrations with e-commerce platform Bigcommerce and email-marketing provider MailChimp on top of the expected payment-processing services. Further integrations with Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks …