POS and Retail

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.

E-commerce technology provider Shopify has launched a redesigned version of its iOS mobile app, adding features designed to enable store management and mobile payments.

The processor Global Payments Inc. now allows merchants to accept donations at the point of sale through an agreement with Digital Processing Solutions.

As more payments companies seek the next big thing, they are finding that mobile payments tech is due for a makeover, and a lot more attention surrounds digital currency such as Bitcoin.

From a consumer's perspective, the Merchant Customer Exchange mobile payment initiative ended 2013 in much the same way as it ended 2012 - with many big-name merchants signed on, but no product available to make payments in stores. Behind the scenes, MCX has made greater strides.

With 2013 coming to a close, here's a look back at some of our favorite contributions to the PaymentsSource blog this year.

Synqera treats its home turf of Russia as a proving ground for new point of sale technology, but it has global ambitions.

DoubleBeam, a white-label payments provider, plans to offer a complete mobile commerce platform for both its online and brick-and-mortar merchant customers through its December purchase of GoPago.

Moscow-based cross channel payments provider Qiwi announced it has acquired 100% of Blestgroup Enterprises Limited.

In the past few years, the payments industry has experienced a flood of new offerings, from consumer-facing giants like PayPal and Google to Silicon Valley startups such as Square.

"Operation Choke Point," the federal government's campaign against online payday lenders and collections agencies, is unjustly attacking third-party payment processors, an association official says.