Merchant

Five years ago, biometric payments seemed ready for the American mainstream. Backers predicted that financial institutions and retailers soon would use fingerprint, palm, vein, iris or facial scans to verify consumers’ identities for ATM and point-of-sale transactions.

Legal collection giant Mann Bracken LLP, at the firm's request, will be placed into receivership and liquidated rather than filing for bankruptcy protection, according to Montgomery County (Md.) Circuit Court officials.

With more borrowers making hard choices about the bills that are most important to pay, more collection shops are adopting a kid-gloves approach to recoveries.

Alabama Attorney General Troy King's office and the Alabama Securities Commission announced this week the permanent shutdown of what they call one of the largest debt settlement schemes in the nation.

Despite a fourth quarter net loss Heartland Payment Systems Inc. attributes largely to breach-related expenses, the Princeton, N.J.-based payment processor sees “encouraging progress” in small and midsize merchant transaction-processing volume and same-store sales, Robert Carr, Heartland chairman and CEO, told analysts during a conference call last week.

Sales agents for ISOs increasingly are seeking additional industry training to improve their abilities to better compete for scarce business during the difficult economy, observers note.

Attendees of the ATM Industry Association show in Miami last week crowded around an ATM some believe could revitalize ISOs that sell ATMs and are suffering from shrinking margins and a lack of new ideas to generate revenue.

Many organizations, such as banks, local business associations, Web-site designers and software developers, refer their customers to independent sales organizations and acquirers for merchant-processing services. The ISO or acquirer then shares with those organizations a percentage of its processing revenue. Or it may provide the referring organization a one-time finder’s fee when the merchant begins processing transactions.

VeriFone Holdings Inc. is supplying 130,000 payment products to Russian bank Sberbank in a multimillion-dollar deal announced today, according to the San Jose, Calif.-based payment-terminal manufacturer. Sberbank is Russia’s largest bank.

In less than two years, the financial world witnessed the collapse of some of the most trusted industry icons, mergers and acquisitions of many of the largest banks and government bailouts - namely TARP.