Disruptors

Blockchain technology associated with Bitcoin has caught the eye of bankers, but now comes the hard part: figuring out where it can be used — international payments, treasury services or elsewhere — without wasting a lot of time and money in experimentation.

Arthur Levitt, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001, will become an adviser to the marketplace lender Social Finance.

Orchard Platform, which provides services to institutional investors in the marketplace lending industry, has raised $30 million in additional funding.

Graduate business students — some of whom previously worked at traditional financial services companies — have been organizing fintech clubs at universities to explore the dramatic changes in banking and to find potential employers.

The smartphone can add significant security to payments, but it is also a tool that fraudsters can exploit. Researchers and scammers have already found several unique attacks that rely on mobile devices.

The "buy buttons" that are popping up on social media platforms are intentionally simple, often meant to enable one-click purchases of individual products. But as the technology's popularity grows, so must its capabilities.

Dylan Richard was the lead engineer for President Obama's reelection campaign, where the use of unstructured "social data" forever changed how presidential win the support of their constituents. Four years later, he's one of PayPal's newest recruits.

More financial services companies are landing on MaRS, a corner of Toronto where developers are building new uses for smartphones, wearables and alternative currencies all under the same roof.

The growing adoption of Apple Pay will help Apple's smartwatch capture up to 68 percent of the smartwatch market by the end of the year.

The mobile wallet market is constantly changing, often in unexpected ways. Products have evolved dramatically in a very short amount of time, and companies that seemed committed to one strategy a year ago now find themselves on a completely different path.

The timing brings Samsung's mobile wallet to market just a few weeks shy of Apple Pay's one-year anniversary — and in line with the expected annual refresh of Apple's iPhone line.

Visa's newly established Bangalore-based technology development center is rebuilding Visa's presence in India, bringing fresh ideas to some older projects.

In the heavily competitive mobile payments market, the fastest way to lose is to pin all hopes on one vendor. Rite Aid learned this lesson the hard way as a participant in the Merchant Customer Exchange, a multi-retailer mobile payments initiative that demanded exclusivity from its partners.

Eris Exchange, an over-the-counter futures market based in Chicago, is trying to stop Eris Industries, a London tech startup, from using the name Eris in markets where both companies operate.

The first version of the Samsung mobile wallet is nothing like the Samsung Pay that is now making its way to handsets. But the one consistent theme in Samsung's strategy is to be the first to experiment with new technologies.

Many payment companies are hosting hackathons to attract developer talent from outside their own ranks; MasterCard found that its own people are just as eager to bring their ideas to life.

Apple Pay users are fanatically satisfied — to the tune of 98% of in-store users and 93% of in-app users surveyed — making an average of 2.6 weekly in-store purchases and 2.3 weekly in-app purchases, according to the Auriemma Consulting Group.

Visa is partnering with and investing in Stripe, fueling the processing startup's international ambitions and product development while giving the card network added juice to build new technology.

Starbucks and American Express are both using cross-merchant rewards to boost their own volume, but with a very different philosophy driving each company's program.

PayPal's gotten off to a rousing start as an independent company, but Visa CEO Charlie Scharf doesn't appear to be worried.