ISO & Agent

Banks and payment card providers would face caps on the transaction fees they can demand from retailers under European Union plans to rein in charges that have been attacked by regulators as anticompetitive.

Tablet point of sale technology provider ShopKeep POS has hired Todd Lasher as vice president and general manager of its channel business.

Dubbed the "Athens of America" because it's rife with colleges and universities in the area, Boston is becoming a hub for tech startups as recent grads — and even dropouts — bring fresh perspective to the payments industry.

C-Sam Inc., Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd. and HyperSoft Co. Ltd. have jointly developed "Salon de Wallet," a mobile wallet for beauty salons in Japan.

Cloud payment processor i2c Inc. and Heartland Payment Systems have teamed to provide prepaid card processing services. Their first collaboration is to add features to the National Restaurant Association’s Edge prepaid card program.

GoCardless is using a link to Sage's accounting software to improve the experience of automating business-to-business payments in a market that typically lags the consumer payments market.

The Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a mobile payments initiative created by major retailers, will use technology from FIS to speed processing and provide access to accounts at a large range of financial institutions.

The payment processor Global Payments Inc. will offer its U.S. merchant customers an iPad point of sale system from ShopKeep POS.

The next big idea for payments is ready to spring to life, and MasterCard wants to be there when it happens.

As EMV-chip card use spreads at the point of sale in the U.S., online merchants will have to change the way they handle payments online.

Mobile transaction technology provider C-Sam has hired former Citigroup executive Kurt Weiss as managing director of global financial institutions and mPayy founder Conrad Sheehan to be general manager of strategic initiatives.

Merchant payment and marketing company Punchey has hired Michael Sattler to be vice president of engineering and Rick Graham as director of demand generation.

BBVA Ventures, the corporate venture arm of BBVA Group, is investing in SumUp, a company that enables mobile devices to accept card payments.

The Fancy, an online shop with items culled by customers, raised $53 million from investors including American Express Co., billionaire Len Blavatnik and actor Will Smith, people familiar with the matter said.

Seeing coins as dead weight in payments, a startup called Coinvenience is designing a system to allow consumers to reject loose change by instructing retailers to deposit the leftover coins into a stored-value account at the point of sale.

LevelUp founder Seth Priebatsch could barely contain his excitement when discussing the possibilities of Google Glass, a mobile device built into a headset that Google sells only to a limited number of early adopters.

The creation of mobile wallets sparked a battle between retailers and wallet providers over the control of consumer data, and the evolution of card-linked services has the potential to stray into a similar minefield.

Intuit's decision to shed its digital banking division demonstrates the technology developer's position that banks aren’t the only way to marry merchant services with consumer mobile payments.

The Chicago Transit Authority is planning an August launch for its new fare system that will allow retail and fare payments from the same card.The open standards fare system is called Ventra and was developed through a partnership between Cubic Transportation Systems, MasterCard and First Data. With it, Chicago transit riders can pay for fares on the city's elevated trains (called the "L"), buses and subway that are all operated by the CTA, as well as suburban bus line fares for routes operated by a separate transit authority called Pace.

Payment Alliance International sees an opportunity in the recent fallout of processors, banks, lenders and merchant services vendors that won't work with the firearms industry, and developed a program to provide its processing services to legitimate gun dealers.