Mobile payments

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.

Amazon.com has been one of the most active companies working to remove friction from payments. This summer, it reached the finish line, removing payments entirely from a portion of its catalog.

The changing demands of consumers who are increasingly mobile, and the emergence of disruptive technology, are changing the payment model for financial institutions.