POS and Retail

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.

Canada's right next door and has lots of English speakers, so it might seem the ideal place for American independent sales organizations to expand. But the two countries' business and cultural practices differ in ways that Americans may not expect.

Mainstream consumers are still slow to adopt newer payment technology, but several cities are pushing ahead of the rest of the world.

Square Inc. said Chief Operating Officer Keith Rabois has resigned, marking the departure of an executive who has helped the company grow to more than 3 million customers. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar will become acting COO.

Synqera is trying to set itself apart from rivals in the targeted-offer crowd by using point-of-sale hardware with data collection tools that look at everything from weather patterns to the shopper's mood.

Priority Payment Systems LLC has signed up for payment processing services from TSYS, or Total System Services Inc.

Citibank India announced the launch of a mobile and tablet card reading device today developed by Ezetap Mobile Solutions.

Amazon.com Inc. has added an in-app purchasing feature for games and other programs developed for the Web, Mac and PC.

Seth Priebatsch, the 24-year-old founder and head of the mobile payment system LevelUp, has made his company a serious player in the emerging payments market — yet he also sports the less-than-serious job title of "chief ninja." The nickname, he explains, has much to do with his approach to running a business.

Walmart and the other Merchant Customer Exchange members recently announced they would opt for a software-based mobile wallet instead of one based on Near Field Communication hardware. Is this a blow to NFC's future or does the technology have enough supporters to eventually change how people pay?

The concept of making anonymous online transactions is in the spotlight because of the prominence of the digital currency Bitcoin, but most consumers remain uneasy with the cryptocurrency's instability and risk. An alternative for the privacy-minded might sprout from Tor, or The Onion Router.