Technology

Few of the security features designed to prove a credit card’s validity in the physical world work well online. One startup aims to change that.

Payments-technology vendor ACI Worldwide Inc. has submitted a bid to buy rival S1 Corp. for $540 million, aiming to thwart a separate deal S1 announced last month to merge with Fundtech Ltd., ACI announced July 26.

Observers have speculated that now that ISIS has signed on card networks Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express to work with its telecom members AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon on mobile payments, it will muscle out competing scheme Google Wallet. To date, Google has signed on one card network, MasterCard, and one telecom operator, Sprint, as well as Citi, First Data and sixteen merchants as tenant partners.

Signaling the opening of a new market for Chinese manufacturers and retailers, Alibaba Group Ltd. is working with Western Union to develop an online payment platform, the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce specialist announced earlier this month.

Suvidha Starnet Pvt. Ltd. will invest more than 5 billion rupees (US$113 million or 80 million euros) to expand the operations of its Beam mobile-wallet service, a sign of the growing confidence in India’s mobile-payments market.

Varying opinions exist on how quickly mobile payments will grow in the U.S., but payments executives generally believe the technology could become a mainstream option for purchasing goods and services within 36 months, new survey data suggest.

The smartphone market is maturing rapidly, but banks risk getting left behind because a growing number of users consider the channel to be unsafe for financial transactions.

USAA has already processed nearly $4 billion in mobile banking transactions in the two years it has offered its Deposit@Mobile smartphone app. The company is now expanding this service, which lets customers deposit checks by snapping pictures of them with their mobile device, to the iPad 2 and plotting a new wave of digital banking products.

Two-year-old mobile payment startup Dwolla has gone from zero to $1 million per day in transactions.

A slowdown in inflows at foreign entities appears to have played a role in the biggest jump in deposits at domestically-chartered banks in more than two years.