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quickly shored up their defenses — while also blaming some vulnerabilities on payment methods they characterize as outdated.