Two leading merchant acquirers, Vantiv Inc. and Heartland Payment Systems Inc., are reporting strong transaction growth in their most recent financials. Boosted in part by its first full year of owning Mercury Payment Systems, Symmes Township, Ohio-based Vantiv on Wednesday said its Merchant Services segment processed 19 billion transactions in 2015, …

More than 750,000 locations representing 17% of the U.S. face-to-face card-accepting merchant base are now enabled to accept EMV chip cards, Visa Inc. chief executive Charles W. Scharf reported Thursday. The EMV acceptance base is up 42% from the 529,000 locations active as of October, when the card networks’ U.S. …

Consumers seem to be very forgiving of retailers who experience data breaches, according to findings from a recent survey for the Merchant Acquirers’ Committee, a trade group of payment processors. Most customers resume shopping—and using a payment card—at a breached retailer within a few months, and among those that don’t …

Prepaid card services provider Green Dot Corp. has struggled to make profits sufficiently large to keep restive shareholders at bay since it became a publicly traded company in 2010. Now one of those shareholders, Harvest Capital Strategies LLC, is calling for the ouster of company founder and chief executive Steve …

In response to pleas from merchant acquirers, Visa Inc. this month modified a deadline in its program to get small merchants into compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, a program the leading payment card network announced to acquirers in October. The change affects the usage of qualified integrators …

Starbucks Corp. keeps adding digital caffeine to its mobile-payments and loyalty offerings built around a prepaid card. The Seattle-based coffee king on Thursday reported that 21% of its U.S. transactions were paid on the Starbucks mobile app in the quarter ended Dec. 27, up from 20% in the previous quarter …

While consumer acceptance of mobile wallets has been painfully slow for wallet developers such as Apple Inc., new survey results from the nation’s largest mobile carrier show consumers are quite willing to use mobile apps in some form to buy things. Some 23% of smart-phone owners last year used an …

In this age of mobile payments, online commerce, and millions of places to use plastic payment cards, cash remains highly relevant and popular with consumers, the nation’s leading retailer ATM network insists. Houston-based Cardtronics Inc. on Thursday released results of a survey showing that consumers use cash far more than …

Toronto-based loyalty-services and payments start-up nanoPay Corp. has acquired the MintChip digital-currency platform from the Royal Canadian Mint, the organizations announced Tuesday. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed, but nanoPay says it could be revealed at a later date. MintChip gained fame in 2012, just as Bitcoin and other virtual currencies …

Two reports released Friday afternoon about consumer spending in the 2015 holiday season document continued strong growth in online commerce, although one report has e-commerce falling slightly short of earlier predictions. And mobile commerce is the new star of consumer payments. In its final report about the 2015 holidays, Internet …