POS and Retail

Merchant payment and marketing company Punchey has hired Michael Sattler to be vice president of engineering and Rick Graham as director of demand generation.

BBVA Ventures, the corporate venture arm of BBVA Group, is investing in SumUp, a company that enables mobile devices to accept card payments.

The Fancy, an online shop with items culled by customers, raised $53 million from investors including American Express Co., billionaire Len Blavatnik and actor Will Smith, people familiar with the matter said.

Seeing coins as dead weight in payments, a startup called Coinvenience is designing a system to allow consumers to reject loose change by instructing retailers to deposit the leftover coins into a stored-value account at the point of sale.

LevelUp founder Seth Priebatsch could barely contain his excitement when discussing the possibilities of Google Glass, a mobile device built into a headset that Google sells only to a limited number of early adopters.

Retailers are bombarded with new mobile payment methods. Many merchants chose to move forward with two or more new technologies rather than bet their future on just one mobile wallet.

The creation of mobile wallets sparked a battle between retailers and wallet providers over the control of consumer data, and the evolution of card-linked services has the potential to stray into a similar minefield.

Intuit's decision to shed its digital banking division demonstrates the technology developer's position that banks aren’t the only way to marry merchant services with consumer mobile payments.

The Chicago Transit Authority is planning an August launch for its new fare system that will allow retail and fare payments from the same card.The open standards fare system is called Ventra and was developed through a partnership between Cubic Transportation Systems, MasterCard and First Data. With it, Chicago transit riders can pay for fares on the city's elevated trains (called the "L"), buses and subway that are all operated by the CTA, as well as suburban bus line fares for routes operated by a separate transit authority called Pace.

Payment Alliance International sees an opportunity in the recent fallout of processors, banks, lenders and merchant services vendors that won't work with the firearms industry, and developed a program to provide its processing services to legitimate gun dealers.

Braintree, a six-year-old payment processor, says it now handles $10 billion in annual transactions. The milestone comes as the company is steadily growing its international customer base, most recently with the addition of Mojang, the Sweden-based maker of games like Minecraft and Scrolls.

The FTC's move to hold payment processors responsible for the deeds of unscrupulous merchants could result in higher prices or fewer choices for small businesses and consumers.

The "nuclear football" allows the president to order a nuclear missile attack from any location, and ZenithSecure took its idea for a new data security vault straight from the playbook for protecting those launch codes.

Members of the EMV Migration Forum are recommending a single common debit code for EMV transactions in the U.S. and plan to provide details later this summer for how the payments industry can implement it.

Intuit Inc. said Monday it has agreed to sell its online and mobile banking division in a $1 billion deal that doesn't include its payments technology for merchants.

Total System Services closed its $1.4 billion acquisition of NetSpend on July 1, in line with its previously disclosed schedule for closing.

Card processor and merchant acquirer Clearent is working with Reward4Schools to help the Missouri-based community rewards provider reach a national audience.

Square Inc. has ended its gift card service, according to a report from Reuters, about half a year after launching the program.

Birch Coffee has used Square's mobile card reader for its delivery service for about two years, and was one of the first to switch to the new Square Market e-commerce site ahead its launch.

CCBill has developed a portal to help merchants analyze data produced by payments to spot purchasing patterns and other trends that can tie past transactions to future business strategy.