ISO & Agent

Platforms that serve as a gateway between retailers' existing systems and new mobile technologies can simplify the process of adding new mobile-based capabilities, including payments.

Roam is approaching potential U.S. clients with a product that allows businesses to deploy and centrally manage a broad network of mobile point of sale terminals.

Petrosoft, a business software provider, is offering quick service retailers and their customers new products to streamline the point of sale experience.

PulseWallet, a biometrics payments provider, is again touting its payment and authentication device, but it must overcome a sudden emergence of competitors that is also trying to breathe life into an idea that has had spotty success in the market.

Stripe is the latest payments provider to integrate its technology with Ecwid, a developer of e-commerce tools to add turnkey online stores to websites, blogs and social media pages.

SCVNGR's LevelUp expected merchants would prefer its Interchange Zero pricing for mobile payments, but many clients told the company they would prefer to pay a 2% transaction fee.

AJB Software Design Inc. has helped J. Crew, an American specialty retailer, integrate EMV-chip card acceptance into its stores in Canada. And with the EMV migration deadline approaching in the U.S., the middleware provider expects more business.

Seamless has signed an agreement with Visita, a Swedish hospitality industry and employers organization, to use the SEQR mobile payment system.

Mobile technology vendor 1OAK says it can enable any point of sale machine to accept payments from a smartphone without changes to infrastructure or back-end payment processing systems.

The new Square iPhone case, designed with accessory developer Griffin Technology, kicks off a program that encourages the development of accessories for Square payments hardware.

Total Merchant Services says it will expand its tablet-based point of sale and cloud-based offerings after acquiring Registroid LLC and its products.

Acquirers say they're signing up new merchants and retaining established customers with the help of software that bundles payment services.

The Target Corp. data breach just before the holiday shopping season triggered another round of rhetoric on the merits and shortcomings of chip-based cards. But the breach's direct effect on merchant EMV plans is largely up in the air.

Mobile payments company I Love Velvet plans to win the business of international merchants by combining its mobile point of sale offering with broader e-commerce and security compliance tools.

DoubleBeam, a white-label payments provider, has started the New Year working to fix a bug that crashed the reporting server used by GoPago, which DoubleBeam purchased last month.

E-commerce technology provider Shopify has launched a redesigned version of its iOS mobile app, adding features designed to enable store management and mobile payments.

The processor Global Payments Inc. now allows merchants to accept donations at the point of sale through an agreement with Digital Processing Solutions.

As more payments companies seek the next big thing, they are finding that mobile payments tech is due for a makeover, and a lot more attention surrounds digital currency such as Bitcoin.

From a consumer's perspective, the Merchant Customer Exchange mobile payment initiative ended 2013 in much the same way as it ended 2012 - with many big-name merchants signed on, but no product available to make payments in stores. Behind the scenes, MCX has made greater strides.

Synqera treats its home turf of Russia as a proving ground for new point of sale technology, but it has global ambitions.