POS and Retail

Banks and payment service providers face increasing competition today in onboarding new merchants. For many of them, the merchant onboarding process is very time-consuming, inflexible and costly.

First Data Corp. has agreed to buy Gyft Inc., which sells digital gift cards, in a move to advance the Atlanta-based processor's mobile payment offerings.

Heartland Payment Systems plans to bolster its existing services to college campuses by acquiring TouchNet Information Systems Inc. for $375 million.

Square plans to offer a version of its mobile card reader that can read EMV-chip cards, but the added security may come at a cost.

The Justice Department's legal case against American Express will not benefit consumers and will weaken competition, said Jeff Campbell, executive vice president and CFO of American Express.

Amazon.com, which just launched its own smartphone, may be nearing the launch of a mobile card reader that would work like Square's device, according to reports. Such a move would complement the company's many recent payment initiatives.

Zing is releasing an iPad app that leverages Web hosted technology to access a large selection of business functions through the point of sale.

Americans love giving and receiving gift cards, whether for their favorite restaurant, shop, or even home improvement store.

Happy Belly Curbside Kitchen, which operates out of food trucks, is planning to become a sit-down restaurant within the next year and is relying on mobile point of sale technology to make the transition.

Apple may have to place more emphasis on the iPad's capabilities as mobile point of sale devices to help it recover from a small but sharp decline in tablet sales.

San Francisco-based Pose, one of the many companies in the cloud-based mobile point of sale market, aims to differentiate itself by eliminating its $49 monthly subscription fee.

The Justice Department's Operation Choke Point isn't really about combatting fraud, says Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association. Federal regulators simply don't like high-risk merchants, such as payday lenders and guns dealers, he says.

Cardfree, a mobile payments provider run by several of the people who designed the successful Starbucks mobile payment app, is using cloud-based technology to simplify the process of deploying its technology as it eyes international markets.

Mobile point of sale provider Appetize is targeting entertainment venues and music festivals, a niche that's often a testing ground for payments technology.

Getting retailers to add mobile payments – or even ban credit cards in favor of mobile – is not impossible. But it just might be easier to get merchants on board with mobile if they haven't even accepted their first payment.

More merchants are interested in accepting payments on tablets and phones, and they have many choices of providers. What are banks and vendors doing to set themselves apart? (Image: ShutterStock)

Powa is reaching out to individual software vendors around the world in an attempt to accelerate integration of its point of sale tools with local mobile apps.

First Data Corp. has added technology from Perka, its customer loyalty subsidiary, to its Clover Station point of sale tablets. This is the latest of several updates First Data has made to boost the appeal of its Clover offering.

As Square's competitors pile on features to win business from the mobile payments pioneer, the company may be seeking to one-up its rivals by adding non-payment services.

There’s a paradox at the heart of mobile payments’ spectacular growth. On a global basis, the use of mobile devices for payments of all kinds is booming: Gartner Group projected worldwide mobile payment transactions for 2013 would total $235.4 billion, an impressive 44% increase over the previous year’s $163.1 billion. Future forecasts for mobile’s growth are equally rosy: Yankee Group now projects that the entire mobile economy will be valued at $3.1 trillion by 2017, with all mobile sectors—devices, commerce, broadband, apps and cloud—contributing to the potential earnings.