Acquiring

Pricing advantages once held by super-large acquirers—those whose merchants process more than 3 million monthly credit and debit transactions—appear to have retreated, according to the Merchant Processing Pricing Benchmark Study recently issued by The Strawhecker Group. These jumbo acquirers had, on average, the lowest amounts for their processing and authorization …

Ouch. Merchant acquirer Square Inc. reported after Thursday’s market close that payment volume grew 45% year over year in the first quarter to $10.3 billion, but the company’s stock still fell 22% on Friday. Despite the strong payments growth, investors didn’t like a number of things they saw in San …

Boosted by a 45% increase in payment volume to $10.3 billion, Square Inc.’s adjusted revenues jumped 64% in the first quarter, but the merchant processor’s net loss doubled to $96.8 million on higher expenses as the company continued to invest like a startup for future growth. In its second earnings …

Independent sales organizations and merchant-services salespeople considering selling all or part of their merchant portfolios have to consider more than finding the right buyer, said a panel of acquiring specialists. While some portfolio valuations might spike as high as the 40s—referring to a multiple of the net monthly processing revenue—that’s not …

BitPay Inc. made its name signing up merchants to accept the bitcoin digital currency, and now it’s adding a reloadable Visa prepaid card to its consumer-facing products. The card will enable users to make purchases at the millions of Visa-accepting merchants as well as the relative handful that accept bitcoin, …

• Retailer Kohl’s says customers can now pay for purchases using their Kohl’s Charge accounts and earn points in its Yes2You Rewards program in approximately 250 stores with a single tap using Apple Pay. Kohl’s expects national availability later this month. Kohl’s says it is the first retailer to offer a …

A well-crafted email message from an executive can cause employees to take swift action. That’s just what criminals hope for when they send phishing messages that purport to be from senior executives to more junior ones, says Scott Montgomery, vice president and chief technical strategist at Intel Security, the data-protection …

• The Federal Trade Commission is investigating PayPal Holdings Inc.’s popular Venmo mobile person-to-person payments service for possible “deceptive or unfair practices,” PayPal reported in a regulatory filing. PayPal said it received a so-called civil investigative demand March 28 from the FTC for documents and answers to written questions about …

The Electronic Transactions Association, a trade group based in Washington, D.C., that represents the merchant-services industry, has opened an office in San Francisco, its first outside of the nation’s capital. The move is indicative of Silicon Valley’s growing presence within the payments industry and, specifically, within merchant services, says Jason …

It may have started with the likes of PayPal Holdings Inc. and Square Inc., but it isn’t stopping there. Having made their mark in merchant processing, high-tech payments firms are increasingly turning their attention to the business of offering funding to the merchants they serve. The move is bringing them …