Economy

VeriFone is seeking a new CEO to take on a laundry list of challenges and opportunities.

The CEO of SignaPay, an Irving, Texas-based acquirer with 14,000 merchants, says he’s again taking an active role in the day-to-day business of moving the company forward.

New software helps salespeople negotiate merchant services contracts and could slow the “race to the bottom” in pricing, says the vendor.

Even though prepaid cards are already widely considered a product for the underbanked, usage patterns are showing more clearly just how different prepaid card users are from bank customers.

San Francisco, Calif.-based startup Balanced says it is gaining traction with online marketplaces, the eBay-like venues where small merchants gather to sell products and services online.

The United States has long resisted adopting the EMV smart-card standard to replace magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards. But the card networks report success in the years-long push to modernize plastic payments.

Milan-based mobile point-of-sale startup Jusp has secured $6 million in an initial round of funding for its chip-and-PIN mobile card reader, which it plans to launch in Italy.

The ATM Industry Association and IPayments Forum have created WikiATM.com, an online repository of ATM information.

PXT Payments, which operates the mobile payments and rewards app "looped in," is partnering with Boston College-based startup Jebbit for a student-focused marketing program that combines mobile payments and gaming.

Seattle-based iKaaz LLC figures the best way to make contactless Near Field Communication payments truly mobile is to create a reader that turns mobile phones into point of sale terminals.

With each career move, Kevin McInturff has strayed farther from the mainstream payments business to work on products that are increasingly experimental and niche.

Walletini is one of a small but growing group of mobile-wallet apps that integrates with Apple's Passbook while also trying to upstage it with an escrow-like service for ticket sales.

When Colonel Harland Sanders created the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in 1955, he couldn't possibly envision how customers in Europe would pay for his fried chicken in 2013. Many will soon use a KFC mobile wallet to feed their fried-chicken cravings.

Instawallet, a Bitcoin wallet service, has "suspended indefinitely" because of fraudulent access, according to a notice on the company’s website today. It is the latest in a series of attacks and glitches to afflict businesses that work with the digital currency.

Some U.S. acquiring industry veterans are organizing the first International Acquiring Forum, which is scheduled for Sept. 17-19 in London and has the backing of the Electronic Transactions Association.

OpenCoin Inc. has acquired Simple Honey Inc., an ecommerce system based on "wish list" shopping.

BitPay Inc. has more than doubled the processing volume it forecasted for March, fueled by recent business moves. It also hired a veteran of the payment processor Global Payments to handle product management.

Tranzlogic LLC is using ISOs to promote transaction data and analytics to merchants.

Xoom is extending its new Pay Only When Received remittance procedure, or POWR, to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Balanced, a startup that allows developers and entrepreneurs to build payments technology, has raised an additional $3.4 million round of seed capital.