Capital markets

Farmers will pay $40 million for the bank, which is in an affluent area in northeast Ohio.

Traditional players are getting innovative, and upstarts are becoming more sophisticated. The survivors will be companies that offer consumers an array of easy-to-use services, a venture capitalist says.

The Independent Community Bankers of America provided seed funding for Teslar Software, which supplies community banks with a platform to manage data from different internal systems.

The agencies handed banks a significant victory when they finalized revisions to the Dodd-Frank proprietary trading ban, but officials also plan to re-propose changes to the “covered funds” section of the rule.

Blooma has developed a software product that combs databases to create property profiles for commercial real estate lenders. It can drastically cut origination costs and approval times and help banks identify safer loans, the company says.

Checkout-free technology is very limited in availability and very much a work in progress, but developers and investors are relying on its promise to accelerate payments' broader evolution from streamlining execution to determining intent.

Changing consumer attitudes about these companies and the emergence of open banking have made them appealing to venture investors, whose commitments rose 15% in the first half of the year.

VCs have been devoting more attention — and funding — to U.K.-based digital remittance providers such as TransferWise, Revolut, WorldRemit and their smaller rival Paysend.

Klarna raised another $460 million in fresh equity funding, pushing the Swedish company’s valuation to about $5.5 billion.

Investors are making bets on checkout-free retail, a category that is just as challenging as it is innovative. But it's payment technology's race to the moon, a chance to seize a favorable position in the struggle to save retail.