POS and Retail

Microsoft has made a series of recent partnerships with payments companies such as AnywhereCommerce, Vantiv and FreedomPay.

Square Inc., the payments startup co-founded by Twitter Inc. Chairman Jack Dorsey, has authorized a tender offer of 1 million shares at $135.28 each, valuing the closely held company at $5 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Toshiba's new entry into the crowded retail mobile payments market is a tablet that can quickly morph back and forth between mobile and more conventional payment methods.

Platforms that serve as a gateway between retailers' existing systems and new mobile technologies can simplify the process of adding new mobile-based capabilities, including payments.

Roam is approaching potential U.S. clients with a product that allows businesses to deploy and centrally manage a broad network of mobile point of sale terminals.

Petrosoft, a business software provider, is offering quick service retailers and their customers new products to streamline the point of sale experience.

PulseWallet, a biometrics payments provider, is again touting its payment and authentication device, but it must overcome a sudden emergence of competitors that is also trying to breathe life into an idea that has had spotty success in the market.

Stripe is the latest payments provider to integrate its technology with Ecwid, a developer of e-commerce tools to add turnkey online stores to websites, blogs and social media pages.

SCVNGR's LevelUp expected merchants would prefer its Interchange Zero pricing for mobile payments, but many clients told the company they would prefer to pay a 2% transaction fee.

Of all the potential benefits, mobile-driven loyalty is the factor with the greatest potential to drive consumer adoption of mobile payments.

AJB Software Design Inc. has helped J. Crew, an American specialty retailer, integrate EMV-chip card acceptance into its stores in Canada. And with the EMV migration deadline approaching in the U.S., the middleware provider expects more business.

Seamless has signed an agreement with Visita, a Swedish hospitality industry and employers organization, to use the SEQR mobile payment system.

Mobile technology vendor 1OAK says it can enable any point of sale machine to accept payments from a smartphone without changes to infrastructure or back-end payment processing systems.

The new Square iPhone case, designed with accessory developer Griffin Technology, kicks off a program that encourages the development of accessories for Square payments hardware.

Total Merchant Services says it will expand its tablet-based point of sale and cloud-based offerings after acquiring Registroid LLC and its products.

Acquirers say they're signing up new merchants and retaining established customers with the help of software that bundles payment services.

The Target Corp. data breach just before the holiday shopping season triggered another round of rhetoric on the merits and shortcomings of chip-based cards. But the breach's direct effect on merchant EMV plans is largely up in the air.

Mobile payments company I Love Velvet plans to win the business of international merchants by combining its mobile point of sale offering with broader e-commerce and security compliance tools.

Cloud-based wallets, QR code wallets and other software-based wallets seem to be shoving Near Field Communication hardware out of the spotlight. But reports of the death of NFC, which enables contactless payments from many mobile devices, have been greatly exaggerated.

DoubleBeam, a white-label payments provider, has started the New Year working to fix a bug that crashed the reporting server used by GoPago, which DoubleBeam purchased last month.