POS and Retail

The days of salesmen peddling point of sale terminals by simply pulling hardware out of a box are likely numbered.

Touch-screen point of sale systems make a substantial impact on a merchant’s bottom line. In fact, a POS system typically delivers 4% to 8% in operational savings, resulting in a significant improvement to a merchant’s profitability.

Nordea Bank will offer iZettle's mobile card readers to its small business customers in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Card manufacturer CPI Card Group is bulking up to handle the anticipated demand for EMV-chip cards as issuers and merchants rush to meet the 2015 deadline set by the card networks.

VeriFone has to concentrate on delivering EMV technology to several different customer groups while also making sure its product offerings stay manageable, CEO Paul Galant says.

Groupon Inc. is expanding its in-store payments business with a new service that lets merchants identify customers with the company's coupons and enable them to pay for purchases using Apple Inc.'s iPad mini.

Square has added and removed many features over its few short years as it refines its mobile-pay pitch in an effort to win more merchants. Its removal of the Square Wallet app was the latest of many revisions to the company's strategy.

U.S. banks and other companies may already be closer to EMV compliance than they realize, says Mansour Karimzadeh, managing director and chief technology officer of payment consultant and technology company SCIL.

Many card issuers think they only have two options when it comes to EMV—keep all issuance in house or outsource.

BitPay will partner with Toshiba to support Bitcoin digital currency acceptance at the physical point of sale through Toshiba's VisualTouch software.

Square now allows merchants to refund part of a sale made through its Square Register mobile point of sale app.

Mobile commerce solutions provider Spindle has entered a distribution deal with Allcom to jointly market payment services and business communications technologies.

Square's latest flurry of features came just in time for Souvla, a new Greek sandwich shop and wine bar in San Francisco.

American Express has added five new acquirers to its OptBlue program, designed to make Amex card acceptance easier for smaller merchants.

Executives at processor Total System Services can't predict which of the many existing mobile payments technologies will dominate the payments landscape of the future, but they plan to aggressively go after the processing business that follows.

Square Inc. now lets its merchants get feedback from customers through a response window added to its digital receipts. Appropriately, the new service is called Square Feedback.

Jusp, an Italian maker of mobile payment systems, is offering its technology on Nokia's Windows-based Lumia smartphones.

The payment processor Vantiv has agreed to buy Mercury Payment Systems LLC for $1.65 billion to expand its services for cloud-based payments integrated into other technology, says Vantiv president and CEO Charles Drucker.

Apple will be ready to accept Near Field Communication payments from phones in its stores, even though none of its consumer devices support NFC out of the box.

Square has removed its cloud-based Wallet app from the Apple iTunes and Google Play stores, apparently to make room for a new app called Square Order.