Payment processing

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.

NorsePayments wants to make it harder for card thieves to perform fraudulent card-not-present transactions.

A massive cyber offensive in which millions of dollars were stolen from two Middle Eastern banks through ATMs in dozens of countries could have been prevented had better security controls been in place at the card processors, the ATMs and the banks involved, observers say. The security lapses could lead to legal liability for many of the companies duped in the process.

The $45 million prepaid card crime spree, recently revealed by law enforcement agencies, is the latest in a long string of hacks on payment processors.

Facebook Connect is an increasingly prevalent way for Internet users to skip registration for other websites by using their Facebook credentials instead — and to WePay, it's also a tool for fighting payment fraud.

The masterminds behind the recent crime spree that netted $45 million in fraudulent ATM withdrawals focused their attention on prepaid cards, highlighting yet another risk banks face when offering such products.