ISO & Agent

DoubleBeam, a white-label payments provider, plans to offer a complete mobile commerce platform for both its online and brick-and-mortar merchant customers through its December purchase of GoPago.

Moscow-based cross channel payments provider Qiwi announced it has acquired 100% of Blestgroup Enterprises Limited.

In the past few years, the payments industry has experienced a flood of new offerings, from consumer-facing giants like PayPal and Google to Silicon Valley startups such as Square.

"Operation Choke Point," the federal government's campaign against online payday lenders and collections agencies, is unjustly attacking third-party payment processors, an association official says.

MoneyGram will extend its agreement to provide services in more than 600 Albertsons locations in the U.S.

As mobile wallets mature, so will attempts to use the technology to marry payments and marketing, says Fiserv's Matt Wilcox.

Lisa Shipley, president of Transaction Network Services (TNS), will lead the board of directors and service as president of the Women's Network in Electronic Transactions (W.net), an organization that provides networking, mentoring, career development and education programming for women in the payments industry.

Merchant Warehouse has seen a lot of momentum these past three months as small and medium-sized merchants adopt its Genius payment acceptance and customer engagement platform, which launched to the general public in January.

The credit-card issuer has agreed to loosen its restrictions on fees charged by retailers to consumers, following a similar move by Visa and MasterCard.

Oink, which was previously called Virtual Piggy, is ready to expand its youth-oriented online payments business to include merchants with a physical presence.

Retailer Target Corp. is investigating a massive data breach that may have affected the card data of millions of bank customers, according to security blogger Brian Krebs. The breach of credit and debit card records is said to have begun on or around Black Friday 2013, the day after Thanksgiving.

A long winter delay at an airport is a perfect opportunity for the businesses that operate there. And especially during the holiday season, NCR Corp. aims to make sure airport merchants are properly equipped to handle payments for harried travelers.

Swedish pharmacy chain Apoteksgruppen will launch SEQR, Seamless' mobile wallet.

VeriFone reported a loss in the fiscal fourth quarter, but beat its internal guidance, and is touting new mobile payments initiatives as a way to improve performance in the future.

Flint is adding a number of new features to its software-based mobile acceptance app, including invoicing, Apple Passbook support and multi-item transactions.

Planet Payment and PT Bank Central Asia (BCA) have launched a service that allows consumers to make international payments in their own currency.

Square has purchased Evenly, a company that provides services for person-to-person payments. The move heightens Square's competition with PayPal and bolsters its own Square Cash product.

Global Payments and mobile operator 1O1O have launched a mobile point of sale service in Hong Kong.

Square's updated mobile card reader adds a lot of new technology, but its omissions speak volumes about the company's strategy.

Square has released a new mobile card reader that is meant to improve accuracy and durability.