Mobile payments

Seamless' international expansion plans have gotten a boost via a deal with the Finnish sporting goods chain store Top-Sport.

Bindo wants to combine its cloud-based iPad point of sale product with an online marketplace, similar to how Square's iPad system links merchants to Square Marketplace. This hybrid approach is meant to make Bindo more appealing to local merchants.

Barclays has experimented with a number of mobile, wearable and online payment systems in its quest to bring its payment offerings into the modern age. Through its tests and live deployments of new technology around the world, the London-based issuer has learned how to entice consumers to move beyond plastic cards.

Capital One has snatched a designer from Google's touted advanced technology and projects team to help boost the bank's mobile commerce and payments technology development.

CaixaBank has started offering a wristband that can make contactless Visa payments at more than 300,000 businesses across Spain.

Yapital, a payment technology company based in Luxembourg, is testing a feature that will allow consumers to authorize payments with their fingerprints. The technology is aimed replacing PINs that consumers use to authorize purchases though the Yapital app.

SCVNGR's LevelUp mobile wallet has updated its Android app to support Android Wear, making LevelUp one of the first payment companies to support Google's smartwatch platform.

JCB plans to expand its current J/Speedy contactless card technology to allow Japanese consumers to make cross-border payments with EMV-chip cards or through smartphones and wearable devices.

Direct carrier billing is gaining in popularity as a way to make payments on – and, increasingly, off – a smartphone. Google is the latest company to put more muscle behind the emerging payment method.

Twitter appears to be preparing to add "Buy Now" buttons to tweets in a move to transform its microblogging service into an e-commerce platform.

The telco is offering Payleven's hardware to enable its small-business customers to comply with an Italian mandate to cut back on cash use.

The website hosting company GoDaddy built its first mobile and online payments service using APIs from PayPal, Dwolla and Stripe.

Sweden's Seamless has entered into an agreement with InComm that will enable the Atlanta, Ga.-based company to offer digitized versions of reloadable closed-loop cards.

The Spanish bank says it is first to bring Visa's version of cloud-based mobile payments to market.

PayPal has added a new fingerprint identification option to its app for users of Samsung's Galaxy Tab S tablet, furthering PayPal's push to be an early adopter of Samsung technology.

The launch of Android Wear, Google's platform for smartwatches, has opened the floodgates for new payment ideas. Some developers are flocking to Google's platform, and others are ignoring Google entirely.

The telco-owned Isis mobile wallet is trying to determine whether its brand is damaged by consumer awareness of the militant group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as it's commonly called by the U.S. media.

PayByPhone has been selected by Florida International University in Miami to provide a cashless payment service for its campus parking lots.

Revel has added a dashboard for Yelp and Foursquare to its point of sale tablet, giving businesses a way to respond immediately to any complaints or praise posted to social media.

Businesses cling to the paper check even as technology moves more payments into the mobile channel. Deluxe Corp. is bridging these two trends with an app starts a payment on a mobile device and ends it with a printed check.