Technology

Starbucks announced today that it is investing $25 million in Square and will begin using Square's mobile payment technology in its stores.

Bank of America Merchant Services is launching a Web portal to allow its merchant clients to offer daily deals through search engines, social media sites and other online forums.

U.S. Senator Richard Durbin said merchants should "think hard" before signing a $6.6 billion settlement with Visa, MasterCard and banks over credit-card fees.

Experian/Moody's Analytics Small Business Credit Index edged up by less than one point in the second quarter, the third consecutive quarterly improvement after falling over much of 2011.

A free video series explaining financial statements and how to analyze them is available from The Kaplan Group through a link on the company's Web site.

GoPago's sales pitch is meant to make terminal manufacturers and independent sales organizations cringe: it is offering free hardware to support a cloud-based mobile payments system to small merchants, with no wiggle room on transaction fee pricing.

Across the industry, the formation of new credit problems has fallen to pre-recession levels. At some banks, however, assets have continued to sour at a troubling pace, according to second-quarter reports.

ViVOtech has sold its ViVOpay payment-hardware business, the company said Monday in a notice on its website.

Continuing its push to make it easier for consumers to make payments in their own country's currency while traveling, Planet Payment, Inc. has extended its Pay in Your Currency service to merchants in the United Arab Emirates.

No one affiliated with the Isis mobile payment initiative is saying exactly when the first testing in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas will begin, but the venture is steadily tying its remaining loose ends.