Acquiring

• North American Cannabis Systems Inc. said it will work with Alternet Systems Inc. to launch a payment system for the cannabis market. Legal cannabis sales are expected to hit almost $7 billion this year. Details of how the system would work were not disclosed. • Elan Financial Services has agreed to provide credit …

• The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority issued a provisional finding that the August acquisition of Germany’s Wincor Nixdorf AG by U.S.-based ATM manufacturer Diebold Inc. “risks a substantial lessening of competition … in the market for the supply of customer-operated ATMs in the U.K.” The new company name is Diebold Nixdorf. The CMA …

After an active 2015 in which such prominent payments-industry firms as processor First Data Corp. and merchant acquirer Square Inc. completed initial public offerings of stock, 2016 saw little IPO activity by payment firms. But 2017 could be a different story, according to an analyst. The most notable new U.S. …

• Payment provider CardConnect released a beta version of Bolt P2PE, its cloud-based API terminal service that enables software companies to integrate their applications with PCI-validated point-to-point encryption and EMV devices for card-present transactions. • Wizard World Inc., producer of such pop culture events as Comic Con, is working with Front Gate Tickets for …

• Mobile in-store payments will total $91.7 billion by 2020, up from $18.7 billion this year, according to a report from Javelin Strategy & Research. Browser-based and in-app mobile payments, however, will dwarf that number, reaching $318.8 billion, nearly doubling 2016’s $161.3 billion. • Movie-ticketing platform Atom Tickets will integrate JPMorgan Chase & …

• Chip card standards body EMVCo reported that 42.4% of global general-purpose credit and debit card-present transactions from July 2015 to June 2016 involved an EMV chip card being read by an EMV-enabled point-of-sale terminal, up from 33% in the previous 12-month period. In the U.S., where the card networks’ POS EMV liability shifts took …

• In a study of more than 900,000 merchants, processor First Data Corp. says retail spending from Thanksgiving through CyberMonday (Nov. 28) grew 5.8% from year-earlier levels; brick-and-mortar retailers saw spending grow 4.1% while e-commerce spending jumped 14.3%. • European software firm Comtrade Digital Services has built an automated banking platform for the Viber messaging app, …

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/dt/201612/

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Can First Data Corp. shake its reputation as the aircraft carrier of the payments industry, a behemoth processor that is anything but nimble? It can, according to a new report from a securities firm. “First Data becoming increasingly competitive,” says the headline in the report by Chicago-based …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Perhaps when he’s not tweeting, President-elect Donald J. Trump will get around to reading the letter the Electronic Transactions Association sent to him Monday outlining payments-industry proposals for Congress and federal regulators once Trump’s administration takes over in January. “ETA encourages your administration to create a policy …