Online payments

There's no shortage of upstarts trying to cut cost, time and risk out of global money transfers. To maintain its position, Western Union is investing in the technologies it finds the most promising while keeping others at arm's length.

The market for international e-commerce in China is growing much faster, and working much more smoothly, than attempts by Western companies to launch within the country.

Icahn Associates Corp., the fund run by billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn, sold its remaining eBay Inc. stake at the same time as it reported a 3.8 percent holding in the Internet auction company’s spun off payments unit PayPal Holdings Inc.

After years of supporting payments research and building a reputation of being friendly toward technology startups, American Express is bringing its key technologies under the Amex Enabled Digital Solutions umbrella.

Video games have long been supportive of new payment systems, in part because many games cater to an audience that may be too young to have a traditional bank account or credit card. But can gamers also be a good target market for financing?

MasterCard has made a series of changes to its executive slate, including the appointment of a chief information officer.

Amazon is constantly unleashing new payment-related products and services. Some efforts succeed, some fail and the rest are a mixed bag — but regardless of the outcome, retailers have a golden opportunity to learn from Amazon's experimentation.

MasterCard is extending its Zero Liability protection to cardholders and small businesses in all of its markets in an effort to recalibrate the program to match the realities of digital commerce.

U.S. Bank is making a small-business online payment management system available to consumers.

In what could be seen as another salvo in the battle between payments and financial services 'disruptors' and more traditional financial institutions, five large technology companies — Google, Amazon, Apple, PayPal and Intuit — have formed a lobbying and advocacy group.

For a time, the European payments market was considered fertile ground for the creation of a third card network to compete against heavyweights Visa Europe and MasterCard. This third network never came to be, but European banks kept the idea on the back burner as a way to compete against or even bypass the major card brands.

Visa's agreement to reunite with Visa Europe positions the global card brand to better address a world where payments and commerce have fewer borders.

Gift cards don't seem like the coolest technology in the payments world, but new and reinvented digital gifting platforms are changing the conversation – by borrowing text-messaging staples like emoji.

If Visa and MasterCard seem to be shining an extremely bright spotlight on their tokenization efforts, it's because they view it as vital to their survival.

MasterCard is talking to Merchant Customer Exchange executives about what role the card brand could play in the retailers' CurrentC mobile wallet, but the card brand insists it is just an interested observer in the merchant mobile wallet venture.

PayPal has long desired to be a force in brick-and-mortar payments, a strategy that's more vital than ever as the newly independent company pursues a course that distances it from its former owner, eBay.

With more smartphones coming equipped with technology that can read each user's fingerprint, it might be time to expand this idea and check the fingerprints of the device itself — particularly as mobile and e-commerce see more fraud as a consequence of EMV tightening up security at the point of sale.

Nearly every social media site is experimenting with 'buy buttons' today, but consumers' actual buying habits sometimes challenge the expectations of merchants and platform providers.

PayPal Holdings Inc.'s third-quarter sales missed estimates in its first report since the company's July separation from eBay Inc., revealing a rocky start to its first few months as a stand-alone company.

Making its first entry into the financial exchange space, Dwolla will provide real-time payments clearing and settlement capabilities for the CME Group futures and options marketplace.