Online payments

The central bank is floating the concept of using the Internet to facilitate the direct clearing of transactions between financial institutions, which would likely diminish its own role in the U.S. payment system.

MoneyGram has extended its relationship with SBI Remit in Japan, providing services both online and through walk-in locations to customers in Japan who want to transfer funds internationally.

Mozido LLC is buying its way into China, giving it a head start as big companies like Apple also eye the country's payments market.

Transpay is launching a mass payout feature which allows users of its cross-border payments platform to send funds to a recipient's bank account within minutes.

For two and a half years, Celine Lazorthes and her team at Leetchi, a group-payment provider for gifts and events, struggled with the regulatory requirements needed to become an e-money issuer in Europe.

Amazon.com is a savvy and influential company in the e-commerce world, but its efforts in payments have been less consistent. It has significantly changed the way people redeem rewards and shop on third-party sites, but it has proven less successful in person-to-person payments and the mobile point of sale.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is pushing hard against charging fees for faster Internet access, a stance that's a relief to businesses like Dwolla that use the Internet to develop and deliver payment services.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s finance arm agreed to buy a 25% stake in One97 Communications Ltd., owner of an online payments processor, to tap into India's growing e-commerce industry.

PayPal is starting the year without its vice president and general manager of retail and prepaid of the past four years.

Payment technology provider Adyen is establishing Bitcoin as a payment option for consumers playing online games from U.K.-based Jagex.

The U.K. is rapidly becoming a target for payment crime, with malware on the rise and the country poised for fraud spikes as crooks abandon EMV-protected terminals to target the more vulnerable e-commerce channel.

PayEase, a merchant acquiring firm based in China, has begun offering online payment services in Taiwan through a partnership with the e-commerce company OnePaid.

Xoom, a digital payments company based in San Francisco, has begun offering money transfers to China.

While Visa and MasterCard aren't yet applying the same level of pressure for tokenization security as they are for EMV-chip cards, the card networks' CEOs are clear that this technology is their new expectation for e-commerce.

MyECheck has reached an agreement to buy the electronic payment software platform developer Seergate.

Visa Europe Ltd.'s full-year profit increased 30% on sharp growth of Internet payments across the continent.

Mangopay, a white-label payment solution provider for marketplaces, has opened an office at Level 39, London's largest technology accelerator.

A lot of companies are lining up to provide payment pages for e-commerce merchants, and BlueSnap is working to set its own offering apart by adding design options for checkout.

E-commerce retailers generally target the 80 million millennial shoppers because they are more likely to buy things online and spend more money online than other demographics.

The Federal Reserve System threw its weight behind a host of standards, goals and timelines yesterday that are likely to shape the quest to build a faster U.S. payment system.