Acquiring

Square Inc.’s official filing to go public means it will soon exit an exclusive club that’s becoming less exclusive by the month: the so-called unicorns, or privately held companies that are worth $1 billion or more. There are 143 such companies now, up from 123 in early August. Indeed, more …

Square Inc. on Friday set a price range for its planned initial public offering of stock in which the high end could generate about $333 million for the merchant processor. Square filed an amended registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that it plans to sell 25.65 million …

Just as Visa Inc. prepares to swallow up the 38-country Visa Europe system, at least one market researcher has released a report expressing some doubt about how long Visa and its bank card rival, MasterCard Inc., will be able to maintain their share of card-accepting merchants around the world. On …

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are shelling out ever more dollars to buy issuer loyalty and induce merchants to route transactions onto their networks. A Digital Transactions News analysis shows the two leading payment card networks are on track to spend approximately $6.75 billon on so-called rebates and incentives in …

Ending months of speculation, Visa Inc. on Monday announced it will buy its European counterpart, London-based Visa Europe Ltd., in a cash, stock, and earn-out deal valued at $23.4 billion. “We’re delighted to be reuniting the Visa family,” said Visa Inc. chief executive Charles W. Scharf in discussing the acquisition …

  If consumer adoption of mobile payments is going to break past its current low rate, purveyors of the services will have to find new ways of making m-payments faster and more convenient to use, and attractive for merchants to accept. That’s the assessment from Derek Francom, director of PayPal …

  A recent Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities’ advisory about potentially requiring independent sales organizations and processors to obtain money-transmitter licenses could pose problems for the payments industry. “It’s the wrong execution of the right idea,” Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Electronic Transactions Association, …

The latest forecast for mobile payments at the point of sale echoes what many other studies have said, which is that current volume is minuscule. But a convergence of forces, including mobile wallets coming preloaded with more and more smart phones and more point-of-sale terminals being able to accept new …

Now that merchant acquirers, and, by extension, merchants, are liable for certain kinds of fraud losses if the merchants aren’t prepared for EMV chip cards, acquirers are starting to put in place EMV non-compliance fees to cover their new risk exposure. One of the first to move on this is …

For merchants these days, laying hands on a payment terminal with the needed EMV certifications is hard enough. Finding a certified device with built-in intelligence is even harder. Against that backdrop, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup called Poynt Co. on Thursday announced its Poynt Smart Terminal is the first such …