The Amazon Coins digital currency is now available for consumers in the U.K. and Germany to buy mobile applications and make in-app purchases on the Kindle Fire tablet and on Amazon.com Inc.'s regional app stores.

Mobile point of sale terminals are projected to reach 46% market penetration by 2017, up from the 17% share of the point of sale terminal market that mobile systems held in 2012, according to a whitepaper by Mobey Forum.

Vodafone Group marked the launch of its European mobile wallet initiative in Spain, revealing plans to expand it into Germany next month and other parts of Europe early next year.

Brooklyn is teeming with New York natives and tourists alike, and the borough's merchants sometimes struggle to keep up with the activity. Several are using mobile point of sale systems from companies like ShopKeep to cut through the chaos.

Many of the payments industry's longtime veterans and new entrants started their careers in other industries or founded their companies with a different purpose in mind. Here are some highlights from the many diverse career paths in the payments world.

On Track Innovations' (OTI) contactless readers have received certification from the mobile wallet venture Isis, which recently launched its Near Field Communication-based payment system nationwide.

Web commerce provider Digital River will supply online payments technology for HarperCollins, which has recently redesigned websites for author C.S. Lewis.

Payment technology provider Yespay and retail services company PMC are partnering to build mobile payment products for retailers.

Rather than simply continuing to absorb the losses from account takeover attacks, institutions should be reevaluating the effectiveness of their authentication methods and increase security to better prevent fraud.

Airtag figures it has landed its mobile payment system in the right places at the right time, concentrating on the fast-food and grocery markets.

The wireless carriers' Isis mobile wallet venture is launching a new program to build merchant support for its technology.

A new multi-purse card called Coin recently caused a commotion as it sparked interest in the concept of a card with a dynamic magnetic stripe. But other companies have pitched similar concepts before.

Atos is studying potential acquisitions to help make the French computer-services supplier's Worldline unit Europe's biggest payments company.

Bank of East Asia will launch a mobile payment service for its credit card customers in Hong Kong early next year.

Andrea Scerch is the new president of DataCash, an e-commerce payments company MasterCard acquired in 2010. Scerch replaces Ajay Bhalla, who is taking on a larger role at MasterCard.

Electronic payments in Bangladesh may increase 20-fold over the next five years as mobile-phone transactions increase and the government pulls citizens into the formal financial system, MasterCard Inc. says.

Allied Wallet is developing new payment technology that allows users to identify themselves by using an add-on fingerprint sensor, and also plans to build biometric acceptance for merchants.

Google Wallet now offers a plastic Google Wallet debit card designed as an alternative to using a smartphone to pay at the point of sale.

PayPal and MyCheck are going to New York's theater district to set the stage for mobile payments. The companies are targeting restaurants with MyCheck’s pay-at-the-table technology.

Shopkick has begun deploying Apple's iBeacon Bluetooth Low Energy technology, which alerts the shopkick mobile app when a consumer enters a store, at Macy’s locations in Herald Square in New York and Union Square in San Francisco.