Mobile payments

A year from now, Sionic Mobile will have distributed 100,000 free iBeacons to small businesses, a $1 million marketing play the company hopes secures its place among local stores as they start to adopt mobile technologies.

Now that Verizon has nailed down a deal to buy Yahoo's search and advertising business, it's starting to look a lot more like Google — and it might even have the tools to take a second stab at the payments industry.

For retailers at least, the most important screens are now the small ones.

The notion that if you build it, they will come clearly doesn’t work with mobile payments, and Apple Inc. is ready to try another approach.

Patrons of the GC Express gas station in Caro, Mich., have another choice to make at the pump: Do they want to pay with a credit union's mobile banking app?

To hear PayPal CEO Dan Schulman tell it, his company's agreement with Visa this week is a transformative and history-making deal. But in at least one way, PayPal must make sure that history does not repeat itself.

Visa and Mastercard both face the prospect of becoming "dumb pipes" as other companies innovate on top of their networks. To combat this trend, both are taking steps to be major players in the digital economy.

They say to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and First Data's Clover operation did just that.

Visa and PayPal have been at war for as long as PayPal has existed, and their recent cease fire could allow both companies to overcome the barriers they have spent years building between the worlds of digital and in-store payments.

Mastercard is betting its $920 million investment in the U.K.'s VocaLink gives it a significant edge in many emerging technologies, particularly in regions where it is lagging Visa in traditional card-based business lines.