ISO & Agent

EBay's planned spinoff of PayPal, announced today, is a necessary and inevitable response to the influx of disruption coming to the payments industry from unconventional sources. As companies like Amazon.com, Apple and Wal-Mart take a growing interest in the payments market, PayPal's status as a unit of a rival e-commerce company limited its role.

The data breach affecting 216 of Jimmy John's restaurant locations had, at its source, an increasingly common exploit: remote-access passwords.

Ukash is expanding its reach in Spain by working with Logista, giving the online cash payment provider a presence at nearly 13,000 more point of sale terminals in the country.

Ingenico Group is leveraging its experience in EMV-chip terminal upgrades and new momentum from Apple Pay to better position itself for the U.S. conversion to smart-card technology.

Spire Payments will supply Indian Overseas Bank with more than 7,500 mobile point of sale devices in its mPOS deployment in the Chennai region of India.

Revel Systems' deal with the New Orleans-based Smoothie King franchise will be the largest deployment to date of its iPad point of sale software.

Merchants using Revel Systems' iPad point-of-sale software will now have the option to incorporate Web ordering into the system, and will also be able to accept Apple Pay when Apple's mobile wallet launches next month.

PAR Technology has acquired Brink Software, a provider of cloud-based point-of-sale services for restaurants.

The PayPal Here mobile point of sale reader is now available on Android tablets, the eBay subsidiary announced Thursday.

Mobile payment provider Flint is adding team accounts to support the move beyond its roots as a vendor to micro merchants.

U.S. merchants will have to upgrade their terminals soon to be able to support the influx of Apple devotees who will want to use their new phones to make payments.

Subway's substantial support of the telco-led Softcard mobile wallet and the recently unveiled Apple Pay, which both use Near Field Communication for payments, is a sign that the technology's interoperability is paying off in larger deployments.

Square has raised $100 million in funding at a valuation of about $6 billion, according to Fortune, which attributed the news to market data source VCExperts.com

MasterCard is establishing a foundation for mobile wallets in Europe by requiring the continent's merchants to accept contactless payments by the end of the decade.

If you can't beat them, join them — and join them fast. The other mobile wallets that already exist on Apple's ecosystem, such as LevelUp and Softcard (formerly Isis), are quickly working to integrate with Apple Pay and the iPhone 6 rather than try to defeat them.

Apple has a long list of supporters for its new mobile wallet, including a few key companies that had already thrown their hats in with PayPal and MCX. Retailers' support of Apple makes NFC a more likely prospect for PayPal mobile payments going forward.

Yapital Financial AG in Luxembourg is integrating its cross-channel payment system into the platforms of VeriFone Systems and the Ingenico Group.

TransFirst Inc. has drawn interest from potential buyers including CVC Capital Partners Ltd. and Total System Services Inc., or TSYS, people familiar with the matter said.

VeriFone is developing a number of uses for the video screens on its point of sale terminals, which can display advertising and other content.

Merchant acquirers and processors are looking at a far different payments landscape in light of recent and anticipated developments from the Merchant Customer Exchange, Apple, Amazon.com and other companies.