Acquirers

The Peterbrooke Chocolatier has a new recipe for mobile payments: it's blending Apple Pay with NCR's order-ahead and mobile point of sale technology to engage its customers in a new way.

Poynt Co., a startup headed by former Google and PayPal executive Osama Bedier, is looking to take advantage of the EMV hardware upgrade schedule to entice merchants to switch to its new app-based payment terminal.

Online art marketplace Etsy is offering a mobile card reader, Sell on Etsy Reader, to its sellers for free, allowing them to transact in-person.

Samsung Electronics has signed a global agreement with Bango to offer consumers direct mobile carrier billing options.

American Express Co. is pulling new levers to build its business with small merchants and drive mobile wallet adoption, emphasizing its work with Apple Pay.

The merchants and issuers invested in Apple Pay must maintain a strong emphasis on employee education — especially if the stakeholders want Apple's mobile wallet to avoid the fate of the many previous payment technologies that sought to displace plastic cards.

EBay and PayPal were once rivals, but in 2002 they joined to become a single company. Since then, PayPal has worked to move beyond the confines of its parent's online auction site. It is now well prepared for its planned spinoff.

EBay's planned spinoff of PayPal, announced today, is a necessary and inevitable response to the influx of disruption coming to the payments industry from unconventional sources. As companies like Amazon.com, Apple and Wal-Mart take a growing interest in the payments market, PayPal's status as a unit of a rival e-commerce company limited its role.

Spire Payments will supply Indian Overseas Bank with more than 7,500 mobile point of sale devices in its mPOS deployment in the Chennai region of India.

Revel Systems' deal with the New Orleans-based Smoothie King franchise will be the largest deployment to date of its iPad point of sale software.

Merchants using Revel Systems' iPad point-of-sale software will now have the option to incorporate Web ordering into the system, and will also be able to accept Apple Pay when Apple's mobile wallet launches next month.

Apple Pay isn't yet on phones, but many companies in the financial services industry have already changed their strategies to respond to it. Some are on board with Apple's new mobile wallet, but others are firmly against it.

Mobile payment provider Flint is adding team accounts to support the move beyond its roots as a vendor to micro merchants.

Square has raised $100 million in funding at a valuation of about $6 billion, according to Fortune, which attributed the news to market data source VCExperts.com

If you can't beat them, join them — and join them fast. The other mobile wallets that already exist on Apple's ecosystem, such as LevelUp and Softcard (formerly Isis), are quickly working to integrate with Apple Pay and the iPhone 6 rather than try to defeat them.

The unveiling of the next iPhone is imminent, and with it Apple is expected to announce plans for a mobile payment system with the support of the major card networks, retailers and banks. But what, exactly, would go into such a system?

Merchant acquirers and processors are looking at a far different payments landscape in light of recent and anticipated developments from the Merchant Customer Exchange, Apple, Amazon.com and other companies.

First Data India is leveraging Roam's mobile platform to launch its own branded chip-and-PIN mobile card reader in the country.

Amazon's launch of a mobile card reader should force many mobile point of sale companies to reevaluate whether their own offerings are distinct enough to ensure their survival.

Square is seeking to gain about $200 million in funding, with part of that coming from the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, according to CNBC.