Payment processing

Many companies in the payments industry have strong, influential women as top executives. These women rarely had a clear path ahead of them when they started out.

Nacha's Janet Estep has just finished one of the biggest weeks of the year for the association—one that included heavy advocacy for automated clearing house payments at Nacha's Payments 2013 conference.

As mobile payments companies seek a receptive audience, many are turning their attention to restaurants. And the food industry, in turn, is increasingly receptive to putting mobile payments on their menu.

Rewarder's a startup that works in reverse of most online markets — it facilitates payments for buyers who are willing to pay for a unique expertise.

CSI Enterprises Inc. has its sights on the travel industry, offering businesses a way to track employee expenses with its new globalVCard mobile payment app.

SumUp, a London-based company that allows merchants to accept card payments on their smartphones, will enable iPad acceptance through a partnership with Revel Systems.

Vindicia, a subscription billing service, is teaming with U.K.-based processor SmartDebit to provide "customer-not-present" payment technology.

Payvia Inc.'s newest clients — Skype, OnCam and Bright — demonstrate a growing appetite for charging payments to consumers' phone bills.

People — and payment companies — are starting to take Bitcoin seriously.The decentralized virtual currency is overcoming its stigma as a fringe currency for illegal transactions and is stirring up consumer scrutiny of the practices of large payment providers. The payments industry is changing rapidly, but today the movement isn't about payments — it's about data.

WorldPay, which provides electronic payment processing, has contracted to bring the NFC and EMV capabilities of VeriFone's countertop payment products to merchants.

Total Systems Services Inc. on April 25 debuted two services designed to make multi-currency shopping and payments easier for users to understand and execute.

GoPago Inc., a San Francisco-based mobile payment provider last week hired Steve Elefant as its chief strategy officer. Elefant, a senior strategic consultant at Google Inc. for the past year, served as Heartland Payment Systems’ chief information officer until 2011.

Chirpify, which lets people initiate payments over social media, has secured another $2 million in funding and now counts rappers Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg as clients.

Iceland's Supreme Court ordered Valitor hf, the Icelandic partner of MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc., to process card payments for anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks within 15 days or face daily penalties.

Avant-Garde Marketing Solutions (AGMS), a merchant service provider, will sell and deploy a number of Ingenico’s new countertop terminals, including those that handle EMV-chip card payments.

A consumer watchdog group in Canada is speaking out in support of the major card brands in response to an argument brought by the country's Competition Bureau on behalf of retailers.

ZooZ, an Israel-based mobile payment company, has secured $2 million in a Series A financing round from supporters XSeed Capital, Lool Ventures and Rhodium. The company's funding now stands at $3.5 million.

Total System Services Inc. is adopting a new infrastructure for card issuing, updating its existing "black box" to allow issuers to more quickly launch new products and services and provide a single view of consumers across multiple relationships.

Mobile point of sale systems could expand card acceptance by adding as much as 19 million merchants, resulting in a potential $1.1 trillion uptick in annual card payments, Javelin Strategy and Research says in a new report.