Fiserv Inc. moved this week to strengthen its hand in the highly competitive hospitality and restaurant industries and pave the way for additional growth in Europe with the acquisitions of digital-commerce platform CardFree and processor AIB Merchant Services. Terms for the two deals, announced Thursday and Friday, were not disclosed. …

Visa Inc. early Thursday announced enhancements to its Visa Intelligent Commerce platform, an artificial intelligence-based shopping service that enables AI agents to shop and make purchases for consumers. The new enhancements include availability of Visa’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to software developers and the launch of the Acceptance Agent …

VikingCloud, a cybersecurity and PCI-compliance company, is collaborating with Fiserv Inc. to make Mastercard Inc.’s Compliance and Validation Exemption Program available to small and mid-size businesses. Announced earlier this year, Mastercard’s C-VEP exempts eligible merchants from complying with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and validating their PCI-DSS compliance …

The credit-scoring company FICO may be poised to unveil this fall new models that include buy now, pay later data, but some payment experts contend it could take years before there is widespread adoption by BNPL lenders. That, in turn, could significantly limit the effectiveness of the new models in …

Zelle, the peer-to-peer payments service from Early Warning Services LLC, is preparing to launch a marketing campaign aimed at highlighting its utility in everyday life. Dubbed “When It Counts,” the campaign is intended to show how woven into consumers’ daily lives Zelle has become, with such features as splitting a …

Payments-orchestration platform Run Payments has launched Run Merchant, an application that consolidates a merchant’s payment infrastructure into a single portal, making it easier to access payment data across multiple gateways and processors. Run Merchant supports payment acceptance via virtual terminals, hosted payment pages, and application-programming interfaces. Additional features include a …

Dutchie, a payments platform provider for more than 6,500 cannabis retailers in the United States and Canada, announced Wednesday the launch of two new enhancements to its platform, E-commerce Pro and the Certified Partner Program. E-commerce Pro is an omni-channel shopping application that embeds payments, loyalty, and marketing capabilities across cannabis retailers’ …

Casino-payments specialist Sightline Payments early Tuesday announced the launch of Sightline Debit, a demand-deposit account and debit card service for gamers to hold funds in a bank account and place wagers using a Visa-branded debit card. Developed in collaboration with Cross River Bank, which will hold the accounts, Sightline Debit …

Authvia, a provider of text-to-pay and conversational-commerce technology for independent software vendors, independent sales organizations, banks, and merchants, has integrated Visa Direct into its TXT2PAY platform. The integration allows merchants and businesses to initiate outbound disbursements, as well as receive inbound payments, in real time. As a result, merchants will …

Gather Federal Credit Union in Hawaii has partnered with equipifi Inc. to become the first credit union in the state to offer buy now, pay later to its members. The credit union, which has more than 39,000 members on the islands of Kauaʻi and Niʻihau, will offer the service as …