Transaction Processing

Square Inc., the point-of-sale technology platform from Block Inc., announced two new deals late Wednesday and early Thursday that underscore its POS ambitions both domestically and abroad. In Chicago, Square said a seafood seller called The Fish Guy has installed an e-commerce service supported by Square and eGrowcery, a Birmingham, …

The Electronic Payments Coalition has opened another front in the battle over the Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act with the launch of an ad campaign aimed at having the law overturned by the Illinois legislature. The campaign comes hard on the heels of efforts by organizations representing financial institutions in …

Oracle Corp. unveiled new technologies for its Simphony Cloud Point of Sale technology, including an embedded AI assistant. Mastercard Inc. adopted a new foundation for its generative artificial intelligence service. An AI foundation is a neural network trained on massive unlabeled datasets, according to technologist Nvidia. Zerohash, a technology provider for payments …

Three organizations representing the banking community, as well as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency along with former acting members of the OCC, filed amicus briefs late Friday urging the court to overturn the decision to exempt Illinois merchants from paying interchange on the sales tax and gratuities …

Mastercard Inc. announced early Tuesday it has agreed to pay $1.8 billion to acquire BVNK, a London-based stablecoin platform. The deal comes amid growing interest in stablecoins among fintechs, banks, and payments providers and as payments networks increasingly view the cryptocurrency as a practical vehicle for overall growth. The transaction, …

Maple AI Inc., a provider of artificial intelligence-based phone-ordering systems for restaurants, has partnered with Shift4 Payments Inc. to integrate its AI-based phone system into Shift4’s SkyTab POS technology. The inclusion of Maple’s AI ordering system in the SkyTab platform is expected to significantly reduce the number of phone orders …

Israel-based payments company Nayax Ltd. lined up another partnership to process payments for electric vehicle owners who stop at E-Plug-branded charging stations. Announced Monday, the partnership means Nayax will handle payments at an anticipated 2,200 connections throughout the United States. Earlier in March, Nayax said 40% of its revenue comes …

New York City-based payments and corporate card platform Ramp Business Corp., said it has acquired Juno, a platform that offers travel arrangements for non-employee travel. Terms were not announced. Ramp’s deal for Juno was preceded by its Friday announcement that it has acquired Billhop, a payments provider licensed in the United Kingdom …

Consumers spend more and shop with greater frequency when friction is removed from payments, says a study from the payments provider Network Merchants Inc., also known as NMI. Some 50% of respondents in the study said they shop more frequently when payments feel seamless, and 48% say they spend more at …