Competitive Strategies

Prepaid card specialist Green Dot Corp. has agreed to buy rival UniRush LLC in a deal valued at a minimum of $147 million and expected to close by the end of March. Pasadena, Calif.-based Green Dot, perhaps best known for managing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s MoneyCard operation, said the deal will …

• Coffee giant Starbucks Corp. reported its Mobile Order and Pay feature, which allows customers to order and pay on their mobile phone and then pick up the order later without waiting, accounted for 7% of all transactions in U.S. company-operated stores in the fourth quarter, up from 3% a year earlier. …

Independent sales organization Total Merchant Services Inc. has added its Groovv POS system to its free hardware program, a move that places all of its products in the program. Prior to this week’s announcement, only point-of-sale terminals were part of the program, says Woodland Hills, Calif.-based TMS. This should make it …

The Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force is in the final stages of reviewing 19 proposals to speed up U.S. electronic payments, Fed executives tell Digital Transactions News. The faster-payments initiative is part of the Fed’s broader Payment System Improvement project that also addresses security and efficiency issues. The Fed …

The company behind the rapidly growing Alipay mobile-payment service is acquiring the second-largest U.S. based money-transfer company. China-based Ant Financial Services Group’s deal to buy Dallas-based MoneyGram International Inc. for $880 million in cash will likely close some time in the second half of the year , according to an …

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) reported that it is talking with the Federal Trade Commission to settle the FTC’s November lawsuit accusing TSYS’s NetSpend prepaid card unit of deceptively marketing reloadable prepaid cards. TSYS took a $13 million charge in the fourth quarter in connection with the settlement talks. • Newtek …

Total dollar volume on Discover Financial Services’ networks increased 2% in the fourth quarter to hit $80.2 billion versus $78.8 billion a year earlier, but results varied among the company’s payment operations. Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover reported Tuesday that the Discover credit card unit posted proprietary volume of $34 billion, up …

• A survey released by RestaurantOwner.com, a resource enterprise for independent restaurant owners, found that the average cost of a restaurant POS system is $13,344, compared with $18,000 in 2012. Only 10% of the 1,190 respondents said they use pay-at-the-table devices, and only 31% used EMV-compliant systems. • Restaurant Brands International, parent company …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews NCR Corp. on Tuesday unveiled a redesigned app for its NCR Silver iPad-based point-of-sale system that eliminates 33 taps from the transaction process and skips the home page in favor of a fly-out menu.

Cachet Financial Solutions Inc., a small tech company best known for providing remote deposit capture services to banks and credit unions, is trying to raise nearly $14 million in new equity to shore up its finances while pivoting toward prepaid cards and facing a legal deadline to rebrand. In a …