Acquiring

As Independence Day nears with all its festivities, fireworks stores are preparing for their largest selling season of the year with EMV chip card acceptance. It evoked a sigh of relief from Bill Weimer, vice president and general counsel of Phantom Fireworks, when the company’s point-of-sale system achieved EMV compliance. …

The pending $145 million acquisition of point-of-sale terminal and equipment distributor POS Portal by ScanSource Inc. will bring together two companies that provide merchants with the equipment they need at checkout counters and back offices, but which have little overlap in their customer bases and distribution channels. Founded in 2000, …

Payments provider Harbortouch Payments LLC said its point-of-sale systems will be featured on new episodes of Spike TV’s “Bar Rescue” program in an exclusive deal with the show. Canada’s Interac debit network announced Sunday that its e-Transfer person-to-person payment service was back online after sustaining an “internal technical issue” that first appeared intermittently Thursday …

Apple Inc.’s “Lose your wallet” Apple Pay promotion apparently paid off handsomely for Square Inc. The promotion, which ran June 23-25, saw 36 local merchants in two San Francisco neighborhoods offer discounts or free items with a purchase when consumers paid for the purchase with Apple Pay, the brand’s mobile-payment …

Never mind that the Democratic administration that created Operation Choke Point is gone, a Republican Congressman wants to be doubly-certain that the controversial program that tries to cut off payment services to fraudulent merchants dies. So he has proposals to kill Operation Choke Point in not one but two bills. In …

Ripple Labs announced the rollout of a real-time remittance service between Thailand and Japan, based on Ripple’s blockchain. The rollout follows what was said to be the first blockchain-based commercial money transfer across borders, which occurred in April between Spain and Mexico and involved Ripple’s technology. CryptoCoin Creations released its CryptoCoinTracker 2.1, an …

Point-of-sale technology vendor ScanSource Inc. has agreed to acquire POS Portal, a supplier of payment devices and services, for $144.9 million in cash plus an earn-out payment up to $13.2 million contingent on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization for the 12 months leading up to Nov. 30. The deal is expected …

Independent sales organization Bluefin Payment Systems said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued the company two patents for data decryption; both patents encompass Bluefin’s Decryptx platform and online P2PE Manager System. Terminal maker Ingenico Group announced it has increased by 200% over the past year its integrations with integrated software vendors, acquirers, electronic …

Discover Financial Services said it has enabled Samsung Pay on the latest Samsung Galaxy smart phones and wearables for its cards in the United States. Discover announced in 2015 that it would support Samsung Pay. Cross-border payments provider Veem, formerly known as Align Commerce, announced an integration with QuickBooks Online, used by small …

U.S.-based cross-border payments provider dLocal said it has added three major Chinese payment systems—WeChat Pay, AliPay, and UnionPay—to its platform. The three account for more than 70% of the Chinese market, according to dLocal. In related news, Flywire Corp., which recently expanded its cross-border payments business to include business-to business transfers, announced it has added …