Retailers

Rockville Centre, N.Y., is bringing back Parkeon's parking meters after a pilot last year, but is removing a feature that provides consumers with coupons to local merchants.

Payment technology provider Merchant Warehouse has agreed to market services from the hospitality mobile payments vendor TabbedOut.

SCVNGR's LevelUp is reducing its mobile wallet's transaction fee from 2% to 1.95% in its continued attempt to shave interchange costs.

The restaurant chain Buffalo Wild Wings will use the NCR Aloha Online Ordering system in its 1,000 company-owned and franchised locations in an effort to improve its takeout ordering business.

Ten years from now, members of the acquiring industry may have fond recollections of the nation's transition to mobile payments, says Brian Mooney, CEO of Bank of America Merchant Services.

An engineering student at Lund University in Sweden has created software that allows shoppers to pay for food by scanning their hands.

Mobile wallets and mobile point of sale systems have tried many tactics to win over merchants by cutting costs. Some vendors have been extremely inventive in how they push cheaper payment options.

The future belongs to mobile payments, but that future remains unclear, as many competing technologies are vying for consumers' attention.

VeriFone Systems plans to offer a new portable card terminal that can accept EMV-chip card payments and uses several wireless technologies.

First Data has introduced new services for small to medium-sized businesses that work with its Clover Station tablet-based point of sale hardware.

Roam, Ingenico's mobile point of sale subsidiary, has partnered with services provider EVO Payments International to market Roam's technology to U.S. merchants.

Gyft, a provider of virtual gift cards, plans to launch Gyft Cloud, a marketplace for merchants to sell their own digital gift cards with Clover Station, a tablet-based point of sale system developed by First Data Corp.

Powa is launching a bundled mobile point of sale offering, called PowaPOS, which U.S. merchants can use to accept EMV-chip cards.

CardFlight, a mobile payments hardware and software developer, has introduced a mobile point of sale device with an emphasis on branding.

The merchants who want to use Leaf's tablet for payments, called LeafPresenter, often also need transaction services. Through the launch of its online marketplace, Leaf will now be ready to offer information from a host of merchant acquirers.

SCVNGR's LevelUp has begun a campaign to urge users of its mobile wallet to fund payments from a debit card instead of a credit card. The end goal is to get its transaction fees as low as possible, while filling a void left by merchants who switched away from another pricing model it boldly called Interchange Zero.

VeriFone Systems had five of its Payware EMV-enabled mobile card readers approved for the Visa Ready Program.

PayPal now offers the chip-and-PIN version of its PayPal Here mobile card reader to merchants in Australia.

Square is accelerating its integration with third parties to save the time and resources it would take to develop the business technology it needs to stay competitive in an increasingly sophisticated and crowded mobile payments marketplace.

Already a major card issuer in the military market, Navy Federal Credit Union is working to expand its merchant services business through new agreements with Square and TSYS.