Acquiring

Merchant processor Square Inc. doubled the number of physical stores at which its now-famous payment card reader for mobile devices can be purchased with Monday’s announcement that the reader is available at Walgreen Co., Staples Inc., and FedEx Corp.’s FedEx Office stores. The three new merchants collectively add 10,000 locations: …

Groupon Inc. redoubled its efforts to penetrate the point-of-sale market with its acquisition of New York City-based software startup Breadcrumb, whose product lets restaurants run transactions on iPad tablets. The deal, announced on Tuesday, follows news that the Chicago-based daily-deal giant is testing a mobile-acceptance service in and around San …

Just as payments executives were preparing to plunge into the Memorial Day holiday weekend, reports emerged that Groupon Inc. is testing a mobile-acceptance application in and around San Francisco. The reports, which are based in part on a solicitation received via e-mail by a merchant, indicate that the Chicago-based daily-deal …

Online merchants and other card-not-present retailers that have so-called interchange-plus agreements with their acquirers are enjoying significantly lower transaction costs thanks to the Durbin Amendment, if research from processor Litle & Co. posted on Wednesday is any indication. Litle’s numbers indicate its client merchants have seen interchange costs cut in …

PayPal Inc. on Thursday announced that 15 more retailers had joined its point-of-sale initiative, which means the No. 1 alternative-payments provider is now more than three-quarters of the way toward meeting its stated goal of having 20 national retailers accepting PayPal at physical stores by the end of 2012. PayPal …

The PCI Security Standards Council on Wednesday published guidance on how merchants can accept card payments through smart phones and tablet computers while protecting sensitive cardholder data. The guidelines, however, do not bring to an end an 18-month-old freeze the council has imposed on approvals of software applications for mobile …

There’s no federal edict to replace fraud-prone magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards with the more secure EMV chip card, but the payment card networks have unveiled various plans in the past year to encourage U.S card issuers, merchant acquirers, and merchants to board the EMV train. Exactly how a U.S. …

The re-terminalization of the merchant point of sale to accept EMV chip cards could generate more than $6 billion in revenues for independent sales organizations and other merchant acquirers, but the changeover is fraught with competitive and operational risks, according to a new research report by Aite Group LLC. Aite …

The market for card-based vending machine purchases has hit some turbulence over the past year, but new competitor Spindle Inc. says the niche still has plenty of long-term opportunities. “I’m not at this point so worried about being different as adding competition,” says Bill Clark, president of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Spindle. …

A little-noticed new Georgia law creates a new type of bank dedicated solely to merchant acquiring that could radically transform how the acquiring business works in the U.S. Enacted at the behest of Global Payments Inc., the big Atlanta-based merchant processor, the law enables a non-bank acquirer to own its …