Payment processing

Payments technology provider ZooZ has developed a product that combines mobile payments with advertising.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a court order to the alternative payment provider Dwolla to cease operations with Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, which it accuses of operating as an unlicensed money transmitter.

Interchange fees often take the spotlight in discussions about card acceptance costs, but they are just one of many factors in the increasingly complex system that determines the price merchants pay for taking plastic cards.

Leaf, which offers a tablet specifically for in-store card payments, has added new features designed to ease user experience and attract third-party developers.

Square has taken its biggest shot yet at traditional payment terminal manufacturers with Square Stand, a new card reader built to house an iPad that can be used in place of a stationary point of sale terminal.

PayPal will offer free payment processing through the end of 2013 to merchants that “trade in” their cash registers and adopt mobile point of sale technologies, in a move to entice small merchants to adopt digital payments.

Groupon's new Breadcrumb POS, a free app enabling merchants to use iPads as point of sale systems, is the latest part of the company's strategy to build a payments business for the small-merchant community it also serves through its daily-deals business.

Australian debit card company eftpos has signed a five-year agreement with mobile wallet technology developer C-Sam.

Mobile pay tech company Boku has entered a carrier billing partnership with Swisscom to provide direct-to-bill payments to more than 6 million customers, or more than 60% of Switzerland's mobile market.

Visa Europe Ltd. plans to "significantly" reduce the fees it sets for processing cross- border credit-card payments in a bid to allay European Union competition concerns, the bloc's antitrust watchdog said.

Prepaid cards have been at the heart of several data breaches in recent years because their traits can make them easier for fraudsters to exploit.

Earlier today Groupon POS, a mobile payment app for merchants using iPads as point of sale systems, was released on iTunes, but the app has since been pulled from the app store.

Visa is adding electronic capabilities to its Visa Offers rewards program, leveraging online and mobile technology to bring offers closer to the point of sale.

Amazon.com's virtual currency Amazon Coins, which launched today, has the potential to become a successful alternative to card payments — if the currency expands beyond digital app purchases.

U.S. consumers conducted nearly half of their online shopping using mobile devices, spending $5.9 billion in mobile commerce sales during the first quarter of 2013, according to Internet analytics firm Comscore.

Roam, a Boston-based Ingenico subsidiary that sells mobile commerce technology, will partner with iPayment to sell a range of mobile payment services to merchants.

Amazon launched its virtual currency, Amazon Coins, giving all U.S. Kindle Fire tablet owners $5 worth of free coins in their Amazon accounts and discounts for purchasing more in bulk.

Typically, I don't cover or analyze so-called payments innovations that merely embrace and extend the legacy infrastructure, but a new middleware startup, CardFlight, could actually operate as a payments "air traffic controller" because its code sits directly between the consumer and the processor.

Simon Haslam is becoming president and CEO of Elavon at a time of extreme stress for payments processors, which face nimble competitors, new payment standards and high-profile security risks.

The identities of the card processing companies whose systems were breached in a massive cyber offensive have surfaced.