POS and Retail

Now's the time for independent sales organizations to start offering mobile-payments options to their merchant customers.

Merchants may have to rely on independent sales organizations and agents to help them make the best use of technology-based loyalty schemes.

VeriFone is making good on its original promise to open up its Square-like mobile card reader, Sail, to developers.

Google Wallet is under increasing pressure — though the mobile wallet has been in consumers' hands for over a year, Google still has fewer issuer partners than its rival Isis, and with the Merchant Customer Exchange wallet on the horizon, Google now faces competition from the very retailers it seeks to attract.

A payments technology provider is enabling acquirers, independent sales organizations and agents to offer a prepaid MasterCard to their merchant customers and share with them a portion of each purchase.

Small business owners in Europe certainly won't have a shortage of mobile payment options to choose from, as more companies enter the market locally and from the U.S.

Payments-industry rivals sometimes put their differences aside to achieve a common goal.

Some experts question whether the United States can meet the deadlines the card brands have set for converting to the EMV chip-card standard from magnetic-stripe cards.

Nearly a third of acquirers surveyed still view mobile payments as a threat.

PayPal's point of sale mobile payment system combines over half a decade of initiatives — and a few notable setbacks along the way.

As a new partner for PayPal, an early partner for Isis and the first issuer to sign on to a new method of participating with Google Wallet, Discover Financial Services is establishing itself as a foundation for mobile payments initiatives.

PayPal next year will extend its reach through Discover Financial Services' network, enabling direct acceptance of the PayPal digital wallet at more than seven million U.S. merchants.

Visa is offering a new data encryption service that could compete with third-party security vendors' offerings. The service's launch also indicates the card brand's growing desire to push beyond the requirements of the Payment Card Industry data security standards.

The merchant wasn't interested in buying, but Joe Porco handed him a business card anyway. The merchant disdainfully threw the card into a waste basket ... and three years of perseverance later he was doing business with the merchant.

Intrix has introduced Invoice Creator, a module for its payment gateway that enables merchants to create and manage invoices from a virtual location.

Independent sales organizations, banks and processors can now offer merchants a virtual business center with 24-7 access to information, services and tools.

In a week's time, the mobile payments world was turned upside down as Square announced a major partnership with Starbucks and a radically different pricing option for merchants. Now payments providers are beginning to piece together how they can ride this wave instead of getting crushed underneath it.

Square is taking a bigger bite at the small-business market by offering flat-fee processing to small merchants, furthering the company's efforts to present itself as a more full-featured option for card acceptance.

ID Tech, a supplier of point-of-sale devices, has agreed to begin outfitting its SecureMag readers with TransArmor data encryption and tokenization from First Data.

Some the nation’s leading merchants announced today the formation of the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, a new mobile-commerce company that will support paying at the register with customizable offers.