POS and Retail

As card fraud progressively moves to e-commerce, more vendors offer merchants the tools to monitor their progress in thwarting cybercrooks — and the information collected in protecting their data also helps merchants promote sales.

After a frustrating year of knocking on doors, Sandra Young still couldn't persuade merchants to sign up for transaction services. She then decided to dedicate herself to a chore not many independent sales organizations or sales agent relish – convincing gas station owners and managers to accept card payments at the pump.

Despite some glitches that are hampering vigorous adoption, the companies targeting mobile payments are finding success in forging brand connections. The problem is their connections are with narrow constituencies, and are often based on competencies beyond mobile payments.

ShopKeep, which provides an iPad point of sale system, began supporting payments from SCVNGR's LevelUp loyalty and mobile payment system this week. One early adopter is already reporting success with the combined system.

Merchant objections to the proposed $7.25 billion swipe-fee settlement are likely to mount following another delay in an appeal ruling.

Visa's V.me digital wallet is picking up momentum and the initiative is "right on the point of the spear" of the card network's product development strategy, Visa says.

A café chain in northern New England is telling its customers that hackers may have breached the company’s payments system. The Works Bakery Café is a small target but its experience is indicative of a bigger trend in data security.

While Facebook is moving to phase out its Facebook Credits, Amazon.com Inc. announced the launch of Amazon Coins, a very similar virtual currency for spending on its Kindle Fire tablet.

VeriFone Systems Inc. said Chief Executive Officer Douglas Bergeron’s trading was the subject of inquiries by the U.S. Attorney and Securities and Exchange Commission, which ended their probes without action.

VeriFone announced Monday the appointment of a new chief financial officer. Marc E. Rothman, a former chief financial officer at Motorola, is becoming an executive vice president at VeriFone and its CFO. He will succeed Robert Dykes, 63, who will retire from his post at the end of the month.

As Loylogic traverses the world looking for more than just a single partner for its rewards redemption app, it's attempting to sweeten the user experience by reducing the amount of navigation needed at the point of sale.

It's shopping season in the payments industry. Just last month, Ingenico, ACI Worldwide and Fidelity National Information Services announced separate acquisitions. Many other companies have bought their peers in recent months.

Numerous merchants don't realize their systems accept Discover, prompting the network to visit their stores in person to ask that the retailers stop turning down its cards.

Verizon Wireless plans to start selling Square Inc.'s mobile card readers in its retail stores today.

Boston-based independent sales organization Merchant Warehouse is launching its Genius payment acceptance product for general availability. The system has been in testing since June 2012.

The council announced Jan. 31 its guidelines for e-commerce data safety. The information is a result of research completed by the council's e-commerce security special interest group.

Technology is moving so quickly that independent sales organizations are finding it difficult to remain relevant.

American Express Co. finds itself swirling in the middle of anti-trust litigation and proposed settlements that the company isn't directly a party to.

Mobile banking is the wave of the future. It's also the future of everything from Google's Wallet to Jack Dorsey's Square to eBay's PayPal. How long mobile payments will remain largely a technology of the future — and how quickly they'll become part-and-parcel of the here-and-now — depends largely on how quickly consumers make them their own.

Jan. 27 marked the first day merchants nationwide could hit consumers with a checkout fee for using a credit card. Nothing has changed overnight, but some merchants are likely to test the waters sooner than others.