John Adams

MasterCard has entered into a commercial agreement with Monitise that includes cooperative development and a plan by the card network to make a minority investment in the technology company.

Target Corp.'s massive holiday-season data breach touched card issuers of all sizes, including banks as small as StonehamBank, which leveraged technology it refers to as a "digital" employee to manage and replace exposed cards.

Square is making all of its payment apps in available in Spanish in an effort to attract Latino merchants in the U.S.

MasterCard has added China to the international roster of markets that accept the card network's MasterPass digital wallet.

There's a lot of investment flowing into mobile payments technology, and perhaps this is more than the market can sustain.

Sionic Mobile, a provider of mobile marketing, gifting, payments and rewards programs, has embedded Google Wallet payments into its ION Rewards app.

PayPal is expanding a merchant credit program that uses payments data to vet borrowers and collect loans.

Activist investor Carl Icahn, who has been calling for eBay to spin off PayPal, is now asking for eBay to conduct a partial initial public offering of the payments processor.

In the truck business, speed matters. And nothing slows down a payment like a paper check.

PayPal's John Lunn doesn't mince words when talking about the work that needed to be done to repair PayPal's developer programs. "Just go back a bit in time, toward the end of 2012 and early 2013, we were losing touch with developers."

Janet Estep is surrounded by almost constant change, both in her own career and in the quickly evolving technology that pressures many of the established banks that make up Nacha's member roster.

Pamela Joseph is one of the top payments leaders at U.S. Bank, which has had a busy year.

Linda Mantia is excited about contactless payments. In her role as Royal Bank of Canada's executive vice president of cards and payments, she is in a position to use new technology to remove the hurdles that have long hindered the growth of mobile payments.

For Jennifer Miles, 2013 was quite a year to become president of VeriFone Americas, as the terminal maker embarked on aggressive pursuit of new payments technology to improve its performance.

As a payments leader at Fiserv, one of the financial services industry's largest technology companies, Ginger Schmeltzer has been a catalyst for a number of cutting-edge projects at banks.

Melissa Smith, became the president of Wex in May 2013 and took over the CEO job at the start of 2014. In these new roles, she is already spearheading a substantial expansion plan that includes the assimilation of Exxon's Esso Card.

Google Wallet will require Android users to run KitKat, the latest version of the Android operating system, to use the wallet's contactless payments feature as of April 14, according to a post on the Google Wallet support site.

Webster Bank's use of advanced alerting allows it to receive valuable, real-time feedback from its customers about how they prefer to make payments, says Greg Jacobi, senior vice president of distribution and customer experience for Webster Bank.

Some of the toughest types of payments fraud to combat aren't from an overseas hackers den but from everyday people misusing their own accounts or those of a relative, says Rick Lynch, Verifi's senior vice president of business development.

Webster Bank's use of advanced alerting allows it to receive valuable, real-time feedback from its customers about how they prefer to make payments, says Greg Jacobi, senior vice president of distribution and customer experience for Webster Bank.