Merchant

Billionaire Jack Ma’s third-party electronic payments operator agreed to offer services to fund companies in China, extending his footprint in the nation’s heavily regulated finance industry.

Facebook Inc. hired Gary Briggs, a veteran of Google Inc. and EBay Inc., to be its first chief marketing officer as the world’s largest social network seeks to expand its global brand.

Even if the Federal Reserve Board does not backtrack sharply on its debit-fee cap as a result of last week's court ruling, the legal battle has created fresh uncertainty that may have some U.S. issuers questioning their long-term strategy.

Visa has elevated former PayPal and Yahoo executive Sam Shrauger to head of digital, part of an internal reorganization at the card network that took place at the end of July, according to an analyst report from Janney.

To create effective mobile payments products, developers must treat merchants and consumers as separate customer segments that have of inextricably-linked needs.

Virtual Piggy, which provides an online youth payment system, now offers digital gift cards on its website through a deal with the prepaid card company InComm.

VeriFone Systems Inc. will soon bundle payments hardware, software, security and compliance into a payments-as-a-service product called VeriFone Point.

It’s not often that early warnings of future challenges are clear, but it seems that rising interest rates will soon stress a collections operation. Fortunately, with data analytics, firms can prepare and leverage recent gains in compliance and customer experience so that rising delinquencies don’t drive inefficiencies or unnecessary cost increases.

PayPal is sponsoring a hackathon series where mobile app developers have just 24 hours to build an app that will win them a trip to PayPal headquarters to compete for $100,000 at the Battle Hack World Finals.

Despite the warnings, cell phones are safe to use at gas pumps — and ExxonMobil Corp. aims to prove this in testing a mobile payment app for smartphone users in Nashville, Tenn.