Online payments

Open development techniques have contributed to a boom in online and mobile commerce by making it possible for more applications to interact with one another, but now more attention is being devoted to how fraudsters exploit these systems at merchants, payment companies and card issuers.

PayPal's split from eBay was supposed to sweeten its appeal to merchants, but it’s also stoking rivals in the payments industry — in particular Visa CEO Charlie Scharf.

PayNearMe has long offered a service designed for consumers who prefer to use cash in a digital world, but even it has to accept the need to get on board with electronic payments.

The acceleration of the Affordable Care Act, along with the longer trend toward consumer-directed health care finance and high deductible plans such as health savings accounts, are decentralizing health care payments.

Coin-counting machines came into vogue in the 1990s when Commerce Bank started installing "Penny Arcades" in its branches throughout New Jersey. They were a huge hit for a while, but banks have soured on the machines in recent years as usage declined and maintenance costs increased.

Robots aren't yet coming to take over, but they will be taking orders — and MasterCard payments — at a handful of Pizza Hut locations in Asia.

With the rise of online card fraud and the availability of new EMV and encryption technology, a San Mateo, Calif.-based startup sees an opportunity to combine these new tools with a card reader called Chip Shield.

Google revealed a dizzying number of projects at this year's Google I/O event, and it is courting developers to turn each of them into a thriving commerce platform. Whether or not Android Pay was mentioned by name, it was an undercurrent of nearly every offering.

Google is helping developers cut steps out of the path to accepting digital payments with several key moves unveiled around the Google I/O developers conference taking place this week.

Fifth Third Bancorp has hired Citigroup's Melissa Stevens to the newly created position of chief digital officer and head of omnichannel banking.