Merchant

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.

Micros Systems UK Ltd. and mobile payments provider Payleven have developed a cloud-based point of sale system that includes mobile chip and PIN card acceptance.

Square, PayPal, Groupon and others recently revealed a flurry of new technology at the point of sale, demonstrating just how capable tablets and smartphones are at handling payments and other needs for small merchants.

BitPay, which processes payments for merchants in the virtual currency Bitcoin, has attracted some investors with a pedigree in pioneering alternative ways to send and receive money.

Little Rock, Arkansas and Oakland, California objected to a multibillion-dollar settlement of a price-fixing case against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. over the fees charged to merchants to process credit-card transactions.

US Merchant Systems, an ISO with 100,000 retail locations, is providing data analytics to customers through Womply Insights.