Acquiring

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 …

• Mastercard Inc. and investor and philanthropist George Soros announced plans “to explore private-sector solutions to societal challenges” by possibly creating a so-called social enterprise called Humanity Ventures that will apply commercial strategies to address such problems as joblessness and lack of access to health care and education. Soros might …

The Electronic Transactions Association went on record Tuesday supporting the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s proposed limited-purpose national bank charter for financial technology companies, but a national trade group of small banks “expressed strong concerns” about the idea. The opinions expressed by the ETA and the Independent Community …

• The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has accepted in principle a number of proposals Mastercard Inc. has made to dispel concerns the agency expressed earlier this month about the planned $920 million merger of Mastercard and the U.K.-based payments-technology firm VocaLink. The CMA had been concerned that the merger would hand Mastercard …