Technology

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s finance arm agreed to buy a 25% stake in One97 Communications Ltd., owner of an online payments processor, to tap into India's growing e-commerce industry.

Mobile payments provider Spindle will provide aggregation technology to EggZack to resell to mobile point of sale and e-commerce merchants.

Supporters of the moves to enhance the availability of low-down-payment loans deny that the industry is taking on too much risk as a result of those moves as some critics claim.

There have been many attempts in recent years to convince issuers and consumers to store multiple payment accounts in a single high-tech card, typically with an emphasis on consumer choice. A new approach uses the same technology but packs in data analytics to take some of that choice out of consumers' hands.

The New Jersey Assembly is weighing whether to pursue legislation that would make the state a haven for digital currency businesses.

PayPal is starting the year without its vice president and general manager of retail and prepaid of the past four years.

It may take years for most small merchants to accept EMV-chip cards in the U.S., but the country's ultimate goal of adopting the secure payment technology is coming together faster than what was seen in other EMV markets.

Stephen Platt, regulatory investigations consultant and author of "Criminal Capital: How the Finance Industry Facilitates Crime," explains his misgivings about the idea of a shared know-your-customer registry for the industry.

Deployments of biometrics are usually fairly challenging, but Apple has demonstrated through its Touch ID fingerprint system that it can scale a consumer biometric technology quickly. London-based ValidSoft predicts it can do the same for voice biometrics by using the microphone built into most consumer gadgets.

Efforts to apply biometric security to payments have reached the fraud-prone remittance market, as Touch ID takes hold for both incumbents such as Western Union and upstarts such as Xoom.