Acquiring

By Jim Daly The coming update to the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) will include new guidelines about physically protecting credit and debit card terminals, when third-party vendors share security responsibilities with merchants, protecting card data in a computer system’s short-term memory, and strengthening passwords, among others. The PCI …

The acquiring business, already fraught with rivalry, became even more competitive on Wednesday with an announcement from daily-deals giant Groupon Inc. that it will supply traditional point of sale terminals to merchants as part of a new initiative under its payments division. The Chicago-based company, which last year jumped into …

A judge in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday gave the Federal Reserve Board a week to indicate its position about a possible interim rule for implementing the Durbin Amendment, the part of 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act that regulates debit cards, after ruling late last month that the Fed’s current regulations do not …

Shopify Inc. hopes to lure small online sellers by the thousands to its e-commerce platform by making the typically vexatious business of taking payments as easy as possible. On Monday, the Ottawa-based company announced Shopify Payments, a service that lets Web merchants sign up to accept a broad range of …

By Jim Daly The big merchant acquirer Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC on Tuesday announced a mobile-payments service that includes a reader that plugs into smart phones as part of a broader new service for small businesses called Chase Checkout. After testing the service in five states, Dallas-based Chase Paymentech quietly …

By Linda Punch If independent sales organizations needed more evidence that the Federal Trade Commission is monitoring their activities more closely, it came last week with the filing of yet another complaint against an ISO. Within weeks of charging two ISOs with violations of the federal Telemarketing Sales Rule, the …

With a federal judge’s crucial decision only weeks away, a company formed to help merchants collect their share of the massive credit card interchange settlement is recruiting independent sales organizations to reach eligible businesses. Baltimore-based Brownstone Recovery Group has signed up more than 10 ISOs so far, according to Scott …

By Peter Lucas PayPal Inc. on Tuesday took more steps toward strengthening its in-store presence, and at the same time broadened the reach of its Bill Me Later lending service to consumers carrying private-label cards. Both arrangements are the result of an agreement with Alliance Data Systems Corp., a big …

More than 18 months after acquiring Point, a Sweden-based provider of payment gateway solutions to merchants, point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. announced Monday that it will roll out the service to U.S. merchants beginning this fall. VeriFone intends to offer Point as a managed service through independent sales organizations …

First Data Corp.’s net loss widened in the second quarter on overall revenue that barely budged from the year-ago period, the huge transaction processor reported on Tuesday. The results throw into relief questions swirling around the Altanta-based company about whether its new top brass can kick-start growth. The company’s $189 …