David Heun

From gold plating to silicon guts, the plastic card is not what it used to be. Here are some of the most ambitious attempts to make credit and debit cards relevant in a high-tech world.

Four months after partnering with linked2pay's Bank Centric Payments platform, ICBA Bancard says it will support real-time posting of payments for community banks and their small business customers.

A popular person-to-person payments app in Italy is getting the backing of Intesa Sanpaolo Bank to become an option at the point of sale in more than 150 retail stores in Milan, Rome and Turin.

Apple Pay will make its debut in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates before the end of the year, the company revealed during its third-quarter earnings call.

As a large furniture retailer in South Florida, City Furniture had to decide whether to move quickly to upgrade terminals and avoid the October 2015 EMV chip card liability shift, or stay on track with a process it was already engaged in for a mobile point of sale system in its showrooms.

One of the critical unanswered questions early in the Single Euro Payments Area process and the new Payment Services Directive in Europe was whether banks would pony up for needed technology upgrades.

American Express and MineralTree are partnering to streamline business-to-business payments by incorporating the Amex virtual corporate card platform into MineralTree's accounts payable processes.

Shopify is working to encourage more physical sales for merchants that don't have physical stores.

Visa is developing its first international transaction processing centers — one in the U.K. and one in Singapore — on the heels of other moves to accelerate digital payments growth globally.

Many companies in the payments industry position themselves as the answer to the competitive threat of Amazon. But that's not the only option out there.