Payment processing

VeriFone shares fell the most in more than two months after Starbucks, the largest coffee-shop chain, said it will use Square’s rival payment system in 7,000 stores.

Starbucks' $25 million investment in Square says a lot about the mobile payment provider's appeal to larger merchants — but the coffee chain's decision to leave out some of Square's technology also speaks volumes.

KeyBank will soon get to test the power of years of investments to its operations and redesigns to rewards as it moves its credit card operation back under its own roof.

Starbucks announced today that it is investing $25 million in Square and will begin using Square's mobile payment technology in its stores.

Bank of America Merchant Services is launching a Web portal to allow its merchant clients to offer daily deals through search engines, social media sites and other online forums.

U.S. Senator Richard Durbin said merchants should "think hard" before signing a $6.6 billion settlement with Visa, MasterCard and banks over credit-card fees.

GoPago's sales pitch is meant to make terminal manufacturers and independent sales organizations cringe: it is offering free hardware to support a cloud-based mobile payments system to small merchants, with no wiggle room on transaction fee pricing.

ViVOtech has sold its ViVOpay payment-hardware business, the company said Monday in a notice on its website.

Continuing its push to make it easier for consumers to make payments in their own country's currency while traveling, Planet Payment, Inc. has extended its Pay in Your Currency service to merchants in the United Arab Emirates.

No one affiliated with the Isis mobile payment initiative is saying exactly when the first testing in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas will begin, but the venture is steadily tying its remaining loose ends.

When people can easily book appointments with small merchants, they don't always show up — and this practice has sparked demand for a system that also accepts deposits, so that merchants can be compensated for no-shows. That same technology can make it easier for companies to accept payments through Facebook pages.

Bloggers and tech reporters have been quick to give Visa a swift kick in the pants for the failure of a point-of-sale system at London's Wembley Stadium during Olympic soccer matches this week. But Visa says, and Wembley Stadium has acknowledged, that the breakdown at the stadium occurred on a system that Wembley owns and operates.

First Data, which processes about half of all U.S. card spending, recently identified that debit spending again overtook that of credit cards. Now another trend is emerging: PIN-debit use is growing much faster than signature debit and credit.

Higher One, the college-payment processor founded by three Yale students, is seeking a buyer and has contacted private-equity firms, said three people with knowledge of the discussions.

Virtual Piggy has added its online payment system for young shoppers to the osCommerce platform, an open-source e-commerce system.

A fresh update to Google's mobile wallet allows users to make payments from any credit or debit card, a move that fundamentally changes the company's approach to working with issuing banks.

Wright Express Corp. continues to extend the reach of its virtual cards tied to travel, announcing today a partnership with the Australian operations of Webjet.com, an electronic manager and marketer of travel and related services.

U.S. payment-card industry rivals have decided to come together, at least for a few days, to better navigate the gargantuan task of migrating to the modern EMV chip-card standard by 2015.

Record transaction processing and growth in the company's noncard businesses helped merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems generate a 44% second-quarter lift to its profits.

Juan Benitez, the new chief technology officer of Braintree Inc., expects to play a key role in the continued growth of the online and mobile payments provider.