ISO & Agent

Square announced expansion into Japan with updated Register features today, after seeing two executives, Alyssa Cutright and Alex Petrov, leave the mobile payments company.

AnywhereCommerce is introducing a card reader about the size of a Zippo lighter that plugs into the audio jacks of mobile devices to accept both magnetic-stripe and chip-and-signature EMV payment cards.

Chase Paymentech Europe, a merchant acquiring and processing subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase, has introduced a new service designed to lighten the security burden for European online merchants.

ControlScan is providing online payments security for ConvergenceHealth's digital- and cloud-based healthcare software and services.

EBay Inc. said PayPal will be available in 2 million retail stores this year as it takes on Square Inc. and Intuit Inc. in the market for mobile payments.

Virtual Piggy is adding merchants in the U.K., setting up its youth money management and ecommerce system at Toy Galaxy and Toadstool companies.

ShopKeep POS designed Surround 360, its iPad point of sale software, to protect independent sales organizations from competitors out to "steal" merchant clients.

ScanPay's card-scanning technology, which allows consumers to enter their card credentials by scanning the card with a phone's camera, was designed to reduce cart abandonment at mobile shopping sites.

Google and Square have entered the notoriously challenging person-to-person payment field, sidestepping one of the major hurdles other companies have faced: signing up new users.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Starbucks Corp. are among 19 retailers opting out of a $7.25 billion antitrust settlement with Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. over fees charged to merchants to process credit-card transactions.

Swipely has secured a $12 million Series B round of financing, which will fund its nationwide expansion, the payments and marketing company announced today.

Licensed gun dealers are finding it increasingly hard to accept card-not-present credit card or debit card transactions, but companies such as Tasker Payment Gateways are not gun-shy when it comes to serving the firearms industry.

Many merchants are still wary about accepting bitcoins, but new vendor partnerships and a maturation of the companies that handle bitcoin exchanges address some of the virtual currency's riskier aspects.

NCR Corp. is integrating SCVNGR's LevelUp mobile payment system with its Aloha POS system for restaurants.

While many still see Bitcoin as an unrealistic payment method, venture capitalists say there are clear use cases for the decentralized cryptocurrency in micropayments, international remittance and charity.

Some consumers in London reportedly experienced problems with the contactless payment system U.K. retail giant Marks & Spencer recently expanded into all of its 644 stores.

MasterCard is part of a joint venture that will launch the Zuum mobile payments service this month. The venture is touting Zuum as the first service of its kind in Brazil.

Priority Payment Systems is offering a new payments platform called Priority MedPay that the company says speeds up collections and reduces administrative costs for medical providers.

The timing couldn’t be better for the new advisory board of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council to include several European voices.

A growing number of payments technology providers are targeting small businesses with mobile point of sale offerings, creating a tech boom for a merchant segment that’s often been underserved.