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PayPal signed many new retail partnerships this year, while also building a digital wallet and a handful of plastic cards to complement its online payment system.

2012 began with the abrupt departure of PayPal's president. Upon putting a new leader in place, the eBay unit made many key moves to adapt its operations and its product line to the fast-changing payments market.

As 2012 progressed, one thing became strikingly clear: the card networks do not want to be left behind as new digital payment methods threaten plastic.

Fraud and data security trends can change by the minute, often making it difficult to pinpoint a specific development as a key event during the course of a year. Not so in 2012.

Digital currency, especially Bitcoin, picked up in popularity this year as the concept began garnering positive attention from payment players — but a series of negative incidents kept the skepticism alive as well.

Total System Services has completed its purchase of ProPay.

The payments industry is no stranger to fraud, but there are some key events that stand out over the course of 2012 — and threaten to spill into 2013.

Private Label Is Dead. The headlines proclaimed this just a few years ago. In one specific case, an activist investor sought to protect Target from the danger of their failing portfolio by forcing them to exit the business. It seemed like every retailer was leaving the space, or at least considering it.

D'mai Urban Spa in Brooklyn, N.Y. loves rainy days because it sees more customers when the weather is dreary. The Park Slope shop gleaned the information from Swipely's technology, which collects data on every customer that swipes a card in the spa.

McDonald's is adding more tap-and-go acceptance at its payment terminals worldwide.

Google’s mobile wallet appears to be staggering to the finish line of 2012. After all, it was a year that started with a reported security breach and is ending with speculation that the search-engine giant will add a plastic card to the otherwise entirely digital wallet.

It's been a rocky year for digital currencies. Facebook began phasing out its Facebook Credits while Bitcoin continues to suffer a bad reputation. However, there are some promising developments on the horizon, with experienced payments providers joining in the digital currency game.

The Google Wallet we see today is a much different product from what we had a year ago. Here are the major changes that took place this year, and the challenges Google faced — and still faces today.

JPMorgan Chase's recent deal to buy the merchant-offer provider Bloomspot Inc. will expand the ways in which the largest U.S. bank by assets presents offers to customers.

At a pop-up market in New York's Union Square Park this week, locals and tourists squeeze past each other as they make their way through rows of candy cane-striped tents, perusing merchants' products as hurried commuters coming and going from a nearby subway entrance dart through the crowd.

Citigroup’s 2G card, developed with technology from Dynamics, promised to revolutionize the way consumers paid with plastic. But the product remains in pilot testing mode more than two years after the partnership was announced and more than a year after Citi reportedly aimed to mass-market the card.

MasterCard Inc., already facing at least 12 U.K. lawsuits after European Union regulators outlawed cross-border card fees, was sued by Deutsche Bahn AG and J Sainsbury Plc.

PNC has piled an abundance of features onto its Virtual Wallet online banking account since the product's 2008 launch, and the underlying technology has creaked loudly under the strain.

After enjoying strong growth in its credit card business in 2012, Discover Financial Services is investing some of those returns in a more diverse range of products.

As many individuals open their wallets and donate to a variety of charitable causes during the holidays, con artists and fraudsters are lurking online, using websites equipped with payments technologies, text messaging schemes and other methods to scam well-meaning do-gooders out of funds intended for worthy causes. It’s an ever-growing problem being addressed by e-commerce industry participants, law enforcement and other groups.