Transaction Processing

With President Obama in the midst of a historic trip to Cuba Monday, payments companies ranging from Stripe to PayPal to Western Union are eyeing new transaction growth as relations thaw between the U.S. and the island nation just 105 miles from Florida. Online payments provider Stripe Inc. announced that …

Two mobile point-of-sale system providers are doing their part in the proliferation of such systems with the release of Click a Waiter Inc.’s white-label POS system and Aspex LLC’s deal with Frontier Airlines to provide an onboard POS system. Leominster, Mass.-based Click a Waiter Tuesday released a white-label version of …

First Data Corp. recently closed one office in Florida and plans to close a bigger one in New York next year, but the company still added 1,000 employees to its worldwide head count last year. Newsday, the newspaper of Long Island, N.Y., reported Tuesday that First Data filed a report …

  Most businesses thrive on referrals from existing clients, but acquirers and independent sales organizations get a surprisingly paltry number of referrals from the merchants they process for. In fact, fewer than 1% of merchants refer other merchants to their transaction servicer, even in the face of rewards such as …

• Dissident shareholder Harvest Capital Strategies LLC, owner of 7.8% of prepaid card provider Green Dot Corp., nominated three director candidates for election at Green Dot’s upcoming annual shareholder meeting. Green Dot issued a statement saying it had recently offered Harvest Capital the opportunity to appoint one director immediately and …

• Merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems Inc. announced an integration of its Portico Gateway with Computop Paygate in an arrangement that will give Heartland merchants access to international payments. Heartland is set to be acquired this spring by Global Payments Inc. in a $4.3 billion cash-and-stock deal announced in December. …

  The U.S. payments industry’s transition to EMV chip cards has produced a number of side issues, but few may be more pressing for card-not-present merchants than the failed authorizations caused by the ongoing replacement of as many as 1.6 billion credit and debit cards. The new EMV cards carry …

Processor Square Inc. expects its strategy of providing what it calls a “cohesive” set of services to merchants will aid its efforts to reach profitability, the company reported Wednesday in its first-ever earnings result since becoming a publicly-traded company. It reported earnings for the fourth quarter and all of 2015. …

With an eye to easing the integration of EMV payment acceptance in mobile apps used for card-present transactions, mobile point-of-sale provider CardFlight now offers integration with Stripe, a payments provider specializing in online transactions. Developers can use the CardFlight software development kit and gateway to add EMV acceptance to apps …

Apple Pay has pulled up to the fuel pump at ExxonMobil Corp. gas stations with the release Tuesday of Speedpass+, an iOS app that enables consumers to use Apple Inc.’s mobile-payment service to pay for gas within the app. The app also is available for Android devices. It also works …