Dogged by seemingly unrelenting bad news that now includes possible violations of U.S. sanctions against Iran, leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. late Monday said its long-time chief executive officer Douglas G. Bergeron “is stepping down,” effective today. The company named its chairman, Richard McGinn, as interim chief …

Mike Duffy, president and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Paymentech merchant-acquiring subsidiary and one of the acquiring industry’s most prominent figures, died Thursday after a long illness. “It is difficult to put into words how much Mike will be missed,” said Gordon Smith, chief executive of Chase …

Using a three-pronged technology play that includes enabling consumers to share merchant offers through social media, Boston-based SCVNGR Inc.’s mobile-payments unit LevelUp has added 500,000 new consumer users in just the past four months, bringing its total user base to 1 million. The strategy is part of a larger plan …

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday released another report on debit card revenues and expenses and says it does not plan to propose changes to its controversial debit regulations implementing the Durbin Amendment in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. Dodd-Frank requires the Fed to report on the debit card market every two …

  Heads look like they’re going to roll at troubled point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. as it begins what chief executive Douglas Bergeron calls a “rebuilding year” in the wake of missteps that contributed to lower-than-expected revenues. Bergeron told stock analysts Tuesday that the company has initiated “an exhaustive …

A spate of cease-and-desist orders by the state of Illinois against unlicensed money transmitters has ensnared eight payments companies, including such prominent ones as Square Inc. and NetSpending Holdings Inc. An agency quietly issued orders against both firms in January that seemingly would prevent them from doing business in the …

When in 2010 our solons in Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act with its Durbin Amendment controlling various aspects of the debit card business, many who opposed this mischievous amendment (including us) did so on principles of free-market economics. We pointed out, for example, that the very merchants who were lobbying …

E-commerce, better malware, and mobile devices are on the minds of fraudsters, according to Trustwave Holdings Inc.’s latest annual data-breach study. Chicago-based Trustwave, a leading data-forensics investigator and security vendor, based its report on 450 data breaches it investigated last year around the world. Hackers targeted payment card data in …

Everyone agrees EMV cards must comply with federal law. Trouble is, nobody can agree on how to make that happen. Meanwhile, a key EMV readiness deadline looms. By Peter Lucas This is no time for the payments industry to be arguing over how to route EMV debit transactions, what with …

The acquiring business has entered an age of disruptive change, but it will emerge all the stronger for it, argues Eric Grover. While individual acquirers and independent sales organizations are fragile, acquiring as a whole is anti-fragile. Eric Grover is principal at Intrepid Ventures, Minden, Nev. Reach him at eric.grover@intrepidventures.com. …