Technology

Interchange fees often take the spotlight in discussions about card acceptance costs, but they are just one of many factors in the increasingly complex system that determines the price merchants pay for taking plastic cards.

Leaf, which offers a tablet specifically for in-store card payments, has added new features designed to ease user experience and attract third-party developers.

Square has taken its biggest shot yet at traditional payment terminal manufacturers with Square Stand, a new card reader built to house an iPad that can be used in place of a stationary point of sale terminal.

PayPal will offer free payment processing through the end of 2013 to merchants that “trade in” their cash registers and adopt mobile point of sale technologies, in a move to entice small merchants to adopt digital payments.

Groupon's new Breadcrumb POS, a free app enabling merchants to use iPads as point of sale systems, is the latest part of the company's strategy to build a payments business for the small-merchant community it also serves through its daily-deals business.

Australian debit card company eftpos has signed a five-year agreement with mobile wallet technology developer C-Sam.

Mobile pay tech company Boku has entered a carrier billing partnership with Swisscom to provide direct-to-bill payments to more than 6 million customers, or more than 60% of Switzerland's mobile market.

Visa Europe Ltd. plans to "significantly" reduce the fees it sets for processing cross- border credit-card payments in a bid to allay European Union competition concerns, the bloc's antitrust watchdog said.

Prepaid cards have been at the heart of several data breaches in recent years because their traits can make them easier for fraudsters to exploit.

Earlier today Groupon POS, a mobile payment app for merchants using iPads as point of sale systems, was released on iTunes, but the app has since been pulled from the app store.