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Flushing Financial in Uniondale, N.Y., has promoted newly hired executive Susan Cullen to chief financial officer.

To improve its commerce and restaurant management offerings, Heartland Payment Systems has acquired Digital Dining, a provider of software that enables handheld point of sale devices to interact with conventional fixed terminals.

Sandy Spring Bancorp in Olney, Md., has appointed executives from the technology and legal industries to newly created seats on its board.

Cybersecurity expertise is helping more women get board seats, as is the British government; MUFG Union's Stephen Cummings calls for faster progress on the diversity front; JPMorgan's Eileen Serra announces a new mobile wallet called Chase Pay; and Deustche's Susan Skerritt shares some leadership lessons.

American Express Co. and merchants fighting the company over rules governing credit-card fees are headed back to the negotiating table.

MasterCard is talking to Merchant Customer Exchange executives about what role the card brand could play in the retailers' CurrentC mobile wallet, but the card brand insists it is just an interested observer in the merchant mobile wallet venture.

Opus Bank in Irvine, Calif., has promoted Jennifer Simmons to chief operating officer and appointed her to the executive committee.

PayPal has long desired to be a force in brick-and-mortar payments, a strategy that's more vital than ever as the newly independent company pursues a course that distances it from its former owner, eBay.

American Express Co., bracing for a decline in profit after the loss of a key retail partner, made a series of organizational changes including combining U.S. and international units and said that consumer product head Josh Silverman is leaving the firm.

One look at the industry's C-suite makes it obvious that banks need to mirror demographic shifts far better and faster.

The alliance between JPMorgan Chase and the Merchant Customer Exchange represents more than an olive branch between two industries that have typically been at war over fee revenue — it's a result of a years-long transformation in how Chase approaches its relationships with the retail sector.

New mobile wallets like the Merchant Customer Exchange's CurrentC may find themselves in conflict with other high-tech mobile apps that came to market sooner.

Most mobile wallets clearly favor one industry over another, with banks and retailers often pitted against each other in a battle over payment card fees. JPMorgan Chase just made a stunning move by conceding some of this ground to the benefit of the Merchant Customer Exchange.

SunTrust Banks has promoted its Atlanta market leader to a new position in wholesale banking and has named its first woman executive to lead the Atlanta market.

Bluetooth beacons are gradually appearing in more stores, and some experts predict their use will grow more rapidly once the devices establish a strong link to payments and other vital retail systems.

Starbucks Corp. said JPMorgan Chase & Co. will process transactions previously handled by Square Inc. as the coffee company rolls out terminals that accept chip-based cards.

The combination of location-based marketing and mobile wallets is relatively new territory for merchants and consumers, bringing these two parties so close together that they may start to overlap.

TCF Financial in Wayzata, Minn., has hired R. Patricia Kelly as its managing director of commercial banking. Kelly joins the $20 billion-asset company from Chicago Corp., where she oversaw the investment bank's financial institutions and real estate units.

Great news: Women snagged a handful of C-level titles at big companies this week, including Ellen Alemany, Kim Hammonds and Heather Cox, and Square stands out in Silicon Valley with a leadership team that's 60% women. Bad news: the gender pay gap is growing and there are only two women among Harvard's picks for the top 100 CEOs globally. Also in the news: Blackrock's Cheryl Mills, B of A's Cathy Bessant and ICICI's Chanda Kochhar.

When Square created the market for mobile point of sale devices, Verifone got defensive. Today, with the rollout of its Engage platform, Verifone is going on the offense.