Visa is learning that it its reunification with Visa Europe last summer came at a very good time.

As marijuana legalization spreads throughout the U.S. and the world, companies in the cannabis market must navigate a delicate tangle of new and old regulations. And many payment providers are unwilling to risk working with dispensaries, leading to some inventive workarounds.

The U.S. trucking industry has benefited from key improvements in fuel-payments technology, with streamlined mobile apps from the likes of WEX and Comdata steadily replacing clunky, older paper-and-plastic fleet card programs for buying fuel, services and lodging on the road.

Issuers and other organizations accept a nominal level of money laundering. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can improve that.

Payments volume and cross-border business helped drive the strong performance.

Banks have long believed that the key to sparking mobile payments is better incentives, but U.S. Bank is taking that to the extreme with a new product that pays triple points for such purchases.

Shopify is approaching merchants on two different fronts, launching a new card reader and a "Shopify Pay" app that are both free to current clients.

Tencent Holdings Ltd. is shutting down a popular feature on WeChat that allows iPhone users to tip emoji and content creators to comply with Apple Inc.’s policy on in-app purchases.

EBay Inc. failed to sustain investor enthusiasm that its turnaround efforts were working, reporting sales growth that continued to lag behind the e-commerce industry and didn’t narrow the gap with giant Amazon.com Inc.

American Express responded to the stresses from the decline in cobrand business with record ad spending and a focus on digital delivery to lure new customers and expand relationships with existing accounts.

Mobile apps still account for only about one percent of transactions. There are a few ways to increase adoption, such as targeting payment types that are already tough to make with cash.

E-commerce can bring many efficiencies to a retailer's operations, but in the legalized cannabis industry, payments must still be handled offline.

The deal with PayRange could expand consumer adoption of a mobile payments app for vending machines that uses a Bluetooth-enabled dongle that connects to a consumer's mobile app.

Large companies are starting to embrace bot technology, with Mastercard, MoneyGram and Western Union all announcing new services.

Subway, Fresh Direct and The Cheesecake Factory are among the first to use Masterpass-enabled bots on Facebook Messenger to sell their wares over social media.

Ripple's distributed ledger platform has fed an appetite for cheaper and more efficient cross-border payments, but it may not measure up to the needs of a larger market. Ripple wants to scale its payment system to something resembling a large card network.

Check imaging reduces the need to handle paper, reduces clearing time and paves the way for mobile deposit and remote capture. However, this new functionality also means financial institutions take on greater risk from electronic acceptance, images in the cloud, and significantly reduced float times.

On Track Innovations will provide mobile EMV payment acceptance for the large cage-type vending machines that Outdoor Vending Solutions uses to sell bulk items at various sites within state parks in Texas.

Ant Financial raised its agreed offer for MoneyGram International Inc. by 36 percent as the financial-services company controlled by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma tries to top a competing offer and overcome security concerns.

New mobile wallets and digital payment innovators are threatening banks' traditional relationships with consumers, forcing banking to respond.