Merchant

The merchant-acquiring industry is turning an Internal Revenue Service reporting requirement into a profit center, some analysts suggest.

Seeking to become a dominant player in the growing school-meals payments arena, a Heartland Payment Systems, Inc. unit has announced the purchase of School-Link Technologies Inc., its fourth such acquisition in the last 10 months.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is open for business, of course, but it still promises to be awhile before the collection industry gets a clear idea of how the regulatory agency intends to oversee it.

Seeking to drive company growth with vendors and ISOs equipped with common sales tools and certifications, NCR Corp. has created a new global partner program, a company executive says.

A Toronto-based payments gateway is providing consumers with a simpler way to make online purchases from mobile phones, and it is looking for independent sales organizations to promote the product to merchants.

In an effort to thwart fraud attempts at the earliest stage of the online ticket-purchasing process, Turkish Airlines Inc. has opted to link its website to CyberSource Corp.’s fraud-monitoring services.

Though it established a two-tier rate structure to accommodate issuers exempt from new caps on debit card interchange established by the Federal Reserve Board, Visa Inc. made only minor changes to the rates acquirers use to determine how much they pay card issuers with less than $10 billion in assets.

Transaction processor TransFirst has purchased RST Ventures Inc., an electronic payment processing services provider that does business as US Merchant Services, TransFirst announced Oct. 5.

The Secure Remote Payment Council reached a watershed moment of sorts last month when it cosponsored a one-day symposium with the Federal Reserve Board of Chicago.

Hypercom USA has changed its name to Equinox Payments LLC in a move that one analyst says should take no one by surprise.