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.

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.

Stockholm-based Seamless will soon integrate Near Field Communication technology into SEQR, its mobile payment app that was originally designed around the use of QR codes.

Addressing the desire of small merchants that want a straightforward way to sell online, Square and Ecwid are partnering to synchronize sales and inventory between the physical and digital worlds.

More than a mere buzzword, "omnichannel" is as close as the payments industry has come to assigning a name to the group of actions that make up a complete purchase across the retail store, Web and mobile devices.

European mobile point of sale company SumUp has brought its technology across the pond.

MasterCard plans to add its tokenization service to the MasterPass digital wallet to boost security for online and in-app purchasing.

Stockholm-based Seamless is threading currency exchange into its QR code-based mobile payment platform SEQR.

Deluxe Corp. is buying data services firm Datamyx LLC from Halyard Capital for $160 million in cash.

With EMV cards fighting counterfeit fraud at the point of sale, Gemalto Inc. says the timing is perfect to launch a payment card with a dynamic verification code to provide a similar improvement to e-commerce security.

Even before Apple Pay burst onto the scene last year as an enabler — and, in many ways, a competitor — of bank mobile wallets, U.S. banks have been told by investors, industry experts and customers to develop their own payment apps.

One of the top lieutenants in Silicon Valley is leaving the side of one high-profile Internet executive in Marissa Mayer to join another, Jack Dorsey.

With its IPO out of the way, First Data is accelerating its focus on merchant technology, and that means luring the developers who are rapidly changing how people shop and pay.

Starbucks and Square, once the hottest couple of the payments world, are splitting up. But their relationship was never perfect; signs of trouble were obvious from the very start.

No wonder Jack Dorsey wants to keep running Square. Dorsey, the payment company's chief executive officer who also just took on the same role at Twitter, is the largest shareholder in Square by a wide margin, with 24.4 percent. The investment firm Khosla Ventures is the second-largest with 17.3 percent, according to Square's registration for an initial public offering filed Oct. 14.

While Sony Corp. is scaling back its global smartphone ambitions, the company still wants to contend with Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. on mobile payments in Asia. Its method for getting there is public transportation.

MasterCard's Craig Vosburg is trying to improve the quality of life in cities around the world.

Capital One Financial Corp. introduced a tap-to-pay mobile-payments service, becoming the first major U.S. bank to offer such functionality in competition with Google Inc.'s Android Pay.

Consumers may not be adopting contactless mobile payments in droves, the tech companies behind the world's most popular smartphones are piling on the mobile wallet bandwagon.

Starbucks Corp. is adding video screens to the drive-thru lanes of 2,400 cafes in the U.S., an attempt to revamp a decades-old ordering system that has become central to how restaurant chains interact with customers.