Economy

BBVA Ventures, the corporate venture arm of BBVA Group, is investing in SumUp, a company that enables mobile devices to accept card payments.

"Bitcoin." Just mentioning the digital currency brings about either a passionate discussion by enthusiasts or vehement criticism that near-anonymous payments are for criminals. In the following interview, serial tech entrepreneur Andreas Antonopoulos talks about the digital currency's rise to fame and the consequences of its popularity.

Mobile payment processor Net Element International Inc. has agreed to acquire European payment network and terminal provider Quickpay in a move to gain traction in Russian cash-based markets.

Six banks in Poland have created a joint venture to develop common mobile payment standards to comply with national regulations — a move that leaves card networks out of the equation.

The Fancy, an online shop with items culled by customers, raised $53 million from investors including American Express Co., billionaire Len Blavatnik and actor Will Smith, people familiar with the matter said.

Seeing coins as dead weight in payments, a startup called Coinvenience is designing a system to allow consumers to reject loose change by instructing retailers to deposit the leftover coins into a stored-value account at the point of sale.

LevelUp founder Seth Priebatsch could barely contain his excitement when discussing the possibilities of Google Glass, a mobile device built into a headset that Google sells only to a limited number of early adopters.

Retailers are bombarded with new mobile payment methods. Many merchants chose to move forward with two or more new technologies rather than bet their future on just one mobile wallet.

Google Glass, a headset built by Google to be the next big mobile device, doesn't do much yet. But its features open new possibilities to companies like Square, LevelUp and PayPal as they seek to take over the point of sale.

The mobile billing company Boku and entertainment giant Sony now allow consumers in the U.K. to purchase content from Sony's PlayStation Store by adding the charges to their mobile phone accounts.

Telecommunications company Everything Everywhere Ltd., operating as EE in the U.K., will offer a new mobile payments service to its customers July 17.

A high-tech crowdfunding firm plans to make investing in early-stage startups as easy as buying a stock on E-Trade.

Users of the currency exchange Ripple Network can now make payments in any currency directly to all Bitcoin users, including 8,500 Bitcoin merchants, through a partnership with BitStamp.net.BitStamp.net allows the Ripple Network to convert currencies into bitcoins by accepting payments in any currency and paying merchants in bitcoins. The offering, called Bitcoin Bridge, was announced at the Bitcoin London conference July 2.

Don Mattrick, who has led development of the Xbox video game console for six years as Microsoft's president of interactive entertainment, is leaving the company to become CEO of social media game developer Zynga.

California’s financial regulator has baffled observers by sending a cease-and-desist “warning letter” to the Bitcoin Foundation. Did the Golden State’s bureaucrats blindly send out letters to any organization it could find with the word “bitcoin” in its name?

As Citigroup has gotten acclimated with person-to-person payments, it's starting to loosen the restrictions on Popmoney, the Fiserv technology it offers to online banking customers.

Square Inc. has ended its gift card service, according to a report from Reuters, about half a year after launching the program.

Birch Coffee has used Square's mobile card reader for its delivery service for about two years, and was one of the first to switch to the new Square Market e-commerce site ahead its launch.

MasterCard has begun offering U.S. merchants and developers Simplify Commerce, a product of MasterCard labs, the Purchase, N.Y. card network's research and development lab.

Payments startup Clinkle has attracted a long roster of Silicon Valley investors for its new payments technology, which is expected to debut within the next year.