Payment processing

Total System Services Inc., or TSYS, has signed a long-term agreement to provide point of sale services, authorization, settlement, reporting, managed services and risk mitigation for independent sales organizations that work with Merrick Bank, a subsidiary of CardWorks Inc.

Acculynk has entered a partnership with Gesa Credit Union to pilot Payzur, a peer-to-peer payment system.

The alternative payments provider Dwolla has garnered much attention from its recent move to facilitate payments through Twitter, but the concept has been tried before — repeatedly, and with few success stories.

U.S. consumers have spent $33.8 billion at online merchants this holiday shopping season, representing a 13% increase over e-commerce spending during the same period last year, according to Internet usage analytics firm comScore.

First Data Corp. called 2012 the “year of universal commerce,” meaning commerce happens anywhere, anytime and on any type of device.

VeriFone Systems Inc., the largest maker of credit-card terminals, was sued by Creative Mobile Technologies LLC for more than $250 million over an agreement to place advertisements on screens in New York taxis.

Since Square launched its mobile card reader, VeriFone Systems has worked feverishly to slow its rival's runaway momentum. The news that VeriFone is changing its strategy with its Sail reader is the latest in a long line of assaults and retreats.

Twitter's immense popularity has caught the attention of many established payment companies and entrepreneurs. Several have attempted to turn the microblogging service into a payment channel, but so far there are few success stories.

A significant setback to adoption of current person-to-person payments technologies is that the transactions often can’t happen in real-time. But by repurposing existing industry infrastructure, companies are devising new methods that make P2P as close to instantaneous as possible.

The processor Total System Services Inc. announced multi-year agreements with two credit unions.

Home Depot Inc. and other retailers lost their bid to appeal a judge’s preliminary approval of Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc.’s proposed $7.25 billion settlement of a merchant fee price-fixing case.

MasterCard is confident that the proposed $7.25 billion settlement of allegations that it and Visa engaged in merchant fee price fixing will receive final approval, according to Nomura analysts who recent met with key executives of the card network.

NCR Corp. added its name to the list of companies offering a mobile payment option for diners. The Duluth, Ga.-based payment terminal and ATM maker announced last week it would offer restaurant merchants NCR Mobile Pay to integrate with its NCR Aloha POS system.

Bitcoin-Central, a French digital currency exchange that handles the largely unregulated Bitcoin currency, now operates under French regulation after parent-company Paymium partnered with payment services provider Aqoba.

Intuit's 2012 New Year resolution for its GoPayment card reader was to take it around the world. It did so in bookend fashion.

Like many New Year's resolutions, this one got off to a great start and then languished. Intuit started the year by offering its GoPayment reader in Canada. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company's next significant international expansion was last week's push into the UK market with a pilot program called Intuit Pay.

Cheap travel and social media continue to connect people all over the world. Companies focusing on e-commerce and payments gateways could see success as the world becomes more globalized by helping merchants handle payments from those who want to spend beyond their borders.

Square and Lemon, two companies that offer mobile wallets on Apple's iPhone handsets, have updated their apps to work with Apple's Passbook wallet.

Square, the mobile-payments startup founded by Jack Dorsey, is giving small merchants the ability to sell gift cards to shoppers on the go, stepping up competition with eBay’s PayPal business.

Aiming to make the shopping experience less painful, mobile point-of-sale platform QThru launched an app that lets consumers bypass checkout lines and pay with their smartphones.

If large retailers felt a need to create their own mobile commerce brand through the Merchant Customer Exchange to lessen customer confusion and control transaction data, then smaller retailers must also feel overwhelmed with all of the mobile payment and commerce choices available.Starting Dec. 10, San Francisco-based CardFree hopes to address that problem as a new company helping merchants develop their own custom-branded mobile commerce tools.