Companies that own contracts with merchants to accept general purpose credit, debit, and prepaid cards (global brands Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, Diners Club, UnionPay, and JCB) as well as PIN-based debit cards (Interlink, Star, Nyce, Pulse, Accel, etc.) are called merchant acquirers. Transactions handled by the five largest U.S. owners of these portfolios of merchant card processing contracts totaled 80.29 billion last year, up 13.7% over 2015. Vantiv, First Data, Chase, Bank of America, and Global Payments (includes a full year of Heartland) ranked as the top five U.S. acqu...