John Adams

American Express and Dwolla suffered website outages, which the companies attributed to distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. Such attacks are designed to knock out a website by flooding it with more traffic than it is designed to handle.

EBay and its payments subsidiary PayPal are aggressively mining consumers' spending data, which they say is vital as shopping expands across mobile, online and physical shopping channels.

Barclaycard US, a unit of Barclays PLC, has multiple projects developing in mobile payments. In addition to its Barclays-branded bPay mobile wallet, Barclaycard is involved in some capacity in the Google Wallet and Isis initiatives. Each of these programs takes a different approach to mobile payments.

Global Payments and edo have started a pilot program to integrate edo's card-linked offer product with Global Payments’ marketing services.

The United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) has accredited Payleven, a mobile payments acceptance company, as a payments institution. Payleven is also now part of MasterCard’s mPOS program.

NCR is launching NCR Aloha Mobile, which allows restaurants to deploy tableside mobile systems for handling meal orders and payments.

Plastiq's service asks consumers to pick up the cost of card acceptance. It presents a service fee that is added to the transaction amount, much like sales tax is typically added at the point of sale.

For the two-year-old LevelUp, the national expansion of a pilot the mobile-payment provider ran with the 16-year-old processor Heartland Payment Systems is nothing short of a godsend.

Barnes & Noble's Nook Media unit is partnering with mobile payment provider Fortumo to allow app developers to sell digital content in the Nook Store, which provides digital content for Nook tablets.

When remittance company Xoom decided to not withdraw money from its customers' bank accounts until the funds reach the recipient, it was betting the added goodwill from users would outweigh the added risk of fraud.

Mobile marketing technology provider Mobivity Holdings Corp. and electronic check company CheckAlt are partnering to develop mobile check acceptance for merchants, as well as other mobile payments technology.

Pencils and paper aren't normally associated with digital payments innovation—yet those tools may inspire a big project with FreedomPay and Barclays.

Fresh off expanding its e-commerce-focused tablet to multiple payments processors, Leaf has established an app store to sell tech components to merchants.

One of the first successful adopters of in-store mobile payments and digital rewards, Starbucks plans to launch new initiatives that will expand the company’s loyalty and payment programs across channels.

Heartland Payment Systems and SCVNGR's LevelUp are taking their merchant services and payments bundle, which they earlier tested in a handful of cities, nationwide.

Leaf, a company that offers a payments-specific tablet, is opening to more processors in an effort to lure merchants away from Square and other point of sale acceptance companies.

Visa CEO Charlie Scharf says a card network changing its pricing and rules for digital wallet providers is "totally appropriate to do" as rival payment companies evolve.

A pending MasterCard "staged wallet" fee, set to take effect in June, is setting a new tone for the emerging payments landscape.

Western Union on March 20 launched a new top-up program and technology to improve the ease of use of its stored-value services.

More large incumbents are establishing in-house teams that mimic the culture — and, they hope, the success — of the increasingly prominent startups they compete with.