Merchant

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.