Technology

Emerging payments developers shouldn't feel forced to place all their bets on one platform or another. In the shorter term, successful future models of banking will be hybrids.

In the past few years, the payments industry has experienced a flood of new offerings, from consumer-facing giants like PayPal and Google to Silicon Valley startups such as Square.

Golden 1 Credit Union reported that approximately 67,000 members were affected by the massive Target Corp. card data breach. The credit union will replace all of their debit and credit cards.

Sony Corp., which launched its new PlayStation 4 video game console last month, is updating and promoting the payment options consumers can use with its new and older PlayStation systems.

Target Corp. faces almost two dozen lawsuits filed by customers after a computer security breach exposed data on 40 million debit and credit cards.

Don't let Target's breach of 40 million payment cards overshadow a much scarier incident at Adobe in recent months.

Small Business Payments Co. recently launched its WorkBench cash management platform, allowing businesses to make credit card and e-check payments, with other features planned for the future.

The Minneapolis-based bank has been using mobile and digital watermark technology internally at board meetings to add multimedia elements to what would otherwise be static reports. It is now extending that technology to shopping and payments.

Auto lease credit approvals fell slightly in November compared with October and year-to-date approvals for customer credit finished November at 72.6 percent, compared with October levels of 72.8 percent, according to Swapalease.com, a national car lease marketplace.

A week ago Sunday at about 10:00 a.m., Jim Wells was on his way from church to a grandson's birthday party, when he popped into Target to pick up a gift. By the time he returned home from the party at about 3:30, there was a voicemail message on his machine from Citibank's fraud control department asking him to call because they thought there might have been fraud on his account.