Acquiring

Merchant processor Vantiv Inc. has agreed to offer a mobile point-of-sale platform from CardFlight Inc. The platform, called SwipeSimple, includes an EMV reader, a mobile app for iOS and Android, and a back-office reporting portal. New York-based CardFlight says the devices will be co-branded with Vantiv’s branding and will be …

• Bloomberg reported that prepaid card services provider Green Dot Corp. is in talks to buy UniRush, a smaller competitor co-founded by Russell Simmons, the music-industry entrepreneur behind the rap label Def Jam. • In another possible deal, U.K.-based accounting and payroll software firm Sage Group plc is mulling a sale of its U.S. …

• Coffee giant Starbucks Corp. reported its Mobile Order and Pay feature, which allows customers to order and pay on their mobile phone and then pick up the order later without waiting, accounted for 7% of all transactions in U.S. company-operated stores in the fourth quarter, up from 3% a year earlier. …

Independent sales organization Total Merchant Services Inc. has added its Groovv POS system to its free hardware program, a move that places all of its products in the program. Prior to this week’s announcement, only point-of-sale terminals were part of the program, says Woodland Hills, Calif.-based TMS. This should make it …

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) reported that it is talking with the Federal Trade Commission to settle the FTC’s November lawsuit accusing TSYS’s NetSpend prepaid card unit of deceptively marketing reloadable prepaid cards. TSYS took a $13 million charge in the fourth quarter in connection with the settlement talks. • Newtek …

• A survey released by RestaurantOwner.com, a resource enterprise for independent restaurant owners, found that the average cost of a restaurant POS system is $13,344, compared with $18,000 in 2012. Only 10% of the 1,190 respondents said they use pay-at-the-table devices, and only 31% used EMV-compliant systems. • Restaurant Brands International, parent company …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews NCR Corp. on Tuesday unveiled a redesigned app for its NCR Silver iPad-based point-of-sale system that eliminates 33 taps from the transaction process and skips the home page in favor of a fly-out menu.

• Fifty-six percent of all bills in the U.S. are paid online at a biller, bank, or third-party site, according to data from ACI Worldwide and Aite Group. Of these, 72% are now paid at biller sites. • Digital-payments company Proxama PLC has agreed to provide payments services to clients of payment …

• Processing-software vendor Womply has launched an analytics tool called Retention Intelligence to help acquirers identify merchants likely to leave the portfolio. • A 2-year-old startup called diningData, which processes payments and analyzes data for restaurants, announced it is now handling $1 billion in annual volume. The company is a division of Hadfield …

Fourth-quarter profits and U.S. charge volume declined while marketing expenses increased for American Express Co. as the company continued to dig its way out of the hole left last year by the termination of its U.S. cobranding and acceptance pact with Costco Wholesale Corp. New York City-based AmEx reported Thursday …