Mobile point-of-sale

The payments industry stood out as an active market for mergers and acquisitions during the first three quarters of 2018 with a 33 percent increase in transactions over the same period last year.

Square CFO Sarah Friar, who helped lead the company's many forays into financial services, is leaving Square to become CEO of Nextdoor, a social network for local neighborhoods.

At Tropical Smoothie, a new IT project will deploy new cloud-hosted point of sale terminals, handheld devices and kitchen display systems over the next few weeks across its 700-location footprint.

The technology arms race among payment fintechs is converging on the market for credit and loans, with Square rolling out an installment payment option for consumers that complements its merchant capital option for sellers.

Square Inc. is offering loans to customers to pay for goods and services from merchants that use its payments platform, another move by the company to push deeper into financial services.

Square’s online payments APIs and Square Invoices are adding support for Google Pay, which the mobile point of sale company hopes will streamline checkout for online stores and websites.

Stripe is making a Stripe Terminal available to its e-commerce clients, looking to unify online and physical point of sale payment streams.

The Lightning Connector eliminates the need for merchants using the Square Reader to rely on a 3.5mm headphone jack of a smartphone or tablet to operate with its mobile app.

Everything's in place for mobile payments to supplant plastic cards in the U.S. — except for a compelling reason for the transition.

After researchers exposed how hackable mobile point of sale systems are, vendors quickly shored up their defenses — while also blaming some vulnerabilities on payment methods they characterize as outdated.

Security researchers are uncovering widespread vulnerabilities in several popular mobile point-of-sale systems, which have become increasingly popular in recent years among many types of merchants large and small.

For their own sake, GrubHub and Uber should have purchased Caviar when Square reportedly offered it to them for sale in 2016. Instead, they now have a competitor who’s looking to eat their lunch in the restaurant delivery business.

Square Inc. gave an earnings forecast for the current quarter and year that fell short of analysts’ high expectations, a rare miss for the company and a signal its spending on new products and growth are tempering profit.

FundKite executives watched the small-business lending sector evolve — and determined that the trend of mobile point of sale providers offering loans and cash advances was limiting the market.

Restaurant point of sale and back-office management provider Toast has received $115 million in Series D funding that the company plans use to develop technology and expand its market.

Paul Galant will leave the CEO post at Verifone in the next few months, following a tenure in which he helped diversify and automate Verifone's merchant acquiring business and led a recovery from a series of strategic and economic missteps.

For stores that don't want such a high-tech makeover, options for automatic checkout options are being built on a much simpler foundation.

Square Inc. shares climbed to their highest price ever after New York granted the company a virtual-currency license, letting customers in the state buy and sell Bitcoin.

As contactless cards continue their momentum in the U.K., new use cases are popping up for the tap-and-go technology.

Going back to the debut of the free Square card reader, the mobile payments market has made fees — or the lack of fees — a major selling point.