John Adams

Fitness4Less plans to cut its costs for handling payments by 80% by switching from a third-party payment processor to a system it controls in-house through an application programming interface (API) from Fundtech.

Santander's Polish subsidiary is linking its mobile banking app to a merchant marketplace where purchases of deliveries, flowers and transit fare can be funded directly from the user's bank account.

International translation service Welocalize has found payments to be a particularly tough language to crack, so it's embarking on a technology project that's designed to improve the system it uses to pay its many diverse business partners.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is developing a product called CashPro BillPay, which combines the bank's CashPro Online treasury management product with Bill.com's payments technology.

eBay has agreed to appoint business executive and former AT&T CEO David Dorman as an independent director, ending its public dispute with investor Carl Icahn, who will withdraw his proposals to separate PayPal from eBay and to place two other people on eBay's board.

The "buy local" Buzz Points loyalty program is adding mobile marketing technology to increase payments volume for non-chain merchants.

Tansler, a "reverse auction" site for renting out properties to vacationers, is preparing to expand from its two test markets to a full global launch. As it does, it needs to make sure it can handle payments from any potential user.

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.

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

Nacha, the electronic payments association, has introduced a voluntary program that would use largely electronic methods to fix exceptions or errors in bill payments.

Smaller businesses often have trouble finding a product designed for their size, and gift cards are no exception, says Mike Fletcher, general manager of InComm Digital Solutions.

Peter Hazlehurst, Google Wallet's director of product management, has quit Google, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

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.

MasterCard's payment processing subsidiary DataCash is leveraging the card network's development arm to lure merchants with a mix of technology that includes mobile payments, digital marketing and augmented reality.

Visa is partnering with BPC Banking Technologies and Multiservice Payment System (PayHD) to enable customs payments across the Russian Federation.

PayStand has launched an online payments platform that allows a variety of payments modes, including Bitcoin, electronic checks and cards.

Much like Africa, India is proving to be fertile ground for mobile money services, and payments processor Calpian plans to extend its reach in the market.

The telecom-driven mobile money provider M-Pesa has expanded to Europe, with cash-heavy Romania as its first market.

Square merchants who sell in the online Square Market can now accept payments in Bitcoin.

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.