John Adams

Google's planned integration of bill pay and presentment with its immensely popular Gmail service could quickly scoop away one of the stickiest offerings of online banking sites.

Selfies, or self-portraits typically taken with a smartphone's camera, are an all-too-common consumer habit. And the practice is now migrating to formal business use, such as for authentication.

Merchant acquirers are required to respond to mobile's impact in an almost infinite number of ways, and in many cases deem acquisition the best and fastest play to diversify beyond payments.

Fast-developing technologies are dumping fresh risk on a payments industry already reeling from a parade of data breaches, placing more pressure on cross-industry efforts to improve security.

Matt Swann, who was in charge of Amazon Register and the defunct Amazon Wallet, has left Amazon.com for a role at Citigroup, according to a report by TechCrunch.

Flint Mobile is joining the many technology companies that are evolving from their roots as payment providers to become enablers of a broad range of services.

TD Bank is expanding its prepaid offerings to meet higher demand from upmarket consumers and to counter competition from rival issuers.

The megabank-led clearXchange digital payment network, which now counts U.S. Bank as a participant, plans to use its considerable reach in the coming year to diversify its capabilities while also pushing for collaboration among other providers.

Square's decision to scuttle its consumer-facing Order app shines an uncomfortable spotlight on the challenges inherent in creating technology that appeals to both consumers and merchants.

A lot of change in the payments business is unavoidable, such as EMV-chip cards and mobile commerce, so the high-tech card maker Stratos plans to replace its cards each year as part of a membership program.

"Women have not reached the most senior levels as much as they should. This isn't specific to our industry; it's prevalent across the corporate world. It's difficult to pinpoint why – rather, it's likely a host of reasons."

"Whether you are a male or female, the most important thing is to always look at creating opportunities for yourself. You cannot wait for someone to think of you."

"At SVB, we consider disruption our friend. Disruptive innovation in payments has historically been more incremental compared to other sectors. But this sector is evolving…and fast."

"The time that we're in right now very much resembles, to me, the time that the Internet was exploding … there's so much going on."

"Many of our clients are women, too, and there's a significant opportunity for females to change the face of this business. I took a hell of a risk when I left the security of a banking job to come to First Data…and I couldn't be happier."

"The differentiating factors in ensuring women get the roles — and recognition — they deserve are the ability to drive change, think innovatively and build consensus. These, combined with the so-called 'soft' skills commonly associated with women, create a clear roadmap for the future of our industry and will allow women to leave a legacy of inspiration."

"Without a doubt, EMV, security and mobility are going to dominate the payments space this year."

The retail services market is flooded with Web-based developer tools that allow small businesses with little tech expertise to develop payment capabilities. But to companies like vCita, these toolkits are still too hard to use.

Mobile technology has enabled financial services in a number of African countries, and MasterCard is working to expand this model by tying it directly to a national identity program in Egypt.

MasterCard and Visa are using Samsung's mobile wallet to further the adoption of tokenization and other security methods at the point of sale, but safety concerns still cast a shadow on mobile payments and commerce.