Online payments

As one of the fastest growing payment companies, all eyes are on Stripe. But if the industry expects the company to launch a sexy, new application they're unlikely to get it.

In responding to advancements in digital payments and consumer tech-savviness, Western Union has launched WU Connect to link its global money transfer services to messaging and social media platforms.

From mobile wallets to machine learning, from biometrics to Bitcoin, many examples of what the industry calls "emerging technology" have finally emerged. But change is happening slowly, as is usual in the complex financial services space.

Visa has introduced Visa Checkout, its online and digital wallet service, to Brazil.

Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey is giving a third of his Twitter stock to the company's employees, he said in a tweet Oct. 22.

Addressing the desire of small merchants that want a straightforward way to sell online, Square and Ecwid are partnering to synchronize sales and inventory between the physical and digital worlds.

More than a mere buzzword, "omnichannel" is as close as the payments industry has come to assigning a name to the group of actions that make up a complete purchase across the retail store, Web and mobile devices.

MasterCard plans to add its tokenization service to the MasterPass digital wallet to boost security for online and in-app purchasing.

Deluxe Corp. is buying data services firm Datamyx LLC from Halyard Capital for $160 million in cash.

Merchants that sell digital goods each spend an average of $10.1 million a year on fraud-related costs — and many expect fraud and chargeback costs to rise in the coming months in the wake of the EMV chip card migration at the point of sale.