Instead of seeing me as an entity they can extract data from, in order to upsell and cross sell, or indeed on order to merchant my data on to other retailers, I want a service provider that I can genuinely trust my data to and who can broker relationships with me across the virtual world.

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Originally founded at MIT and now boasting teammates in both Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Francisco, Locu is on a mission to connect local merchants and consumers, says its Director of Data Adam Marcus, which he says it does by finding, cleaning, and making available local merchant pricing and menu data, which can then be claimed and customized by merchants.

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The size of a loan can increase with more data that a merchant adds from more online accounts.

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Since March, i-design has signed a major contract with merchant processing services provider First Data for the supply of joono software, and has sold an additional 3, 000 software licenses to Barclays Bank and US-based Cardtronics Inc.

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Dynamic elements to transactions will make account data hard to steal or compromise, thus making merchant systems safer and more secure.

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Crowley says Foursquare has a load of data that it is working with to build out more merchant tools.

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The 16-digit account number stored in your card's magnetic stripe zooms across a leased phone line to the merchant's bank, zips under the Pacific to Visa's data center outside Tokyo and rides the Visa network to the data center of your issuing bank in Delaware.

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