Online payments

Retailers are adopting many innovations to counter the lure of online shopping, which is becoming more of a threat to brick-and-mortar stores as e-commerce spreads to a growing number of Internet-connected devices.

Banks in Europe are selling digital gift cards alongside traditional bank accounts, allowing online consumers to buy credit for Facebook, Nintendo, Spotify and other content providers.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is in talks to buy a minority stake in India's One97 Communications Ltd., owner of an online payments processor, according to people familiar with the matter.

Education payments company peerTransfer has grown quickly by providing a specialized service to a specific market, but it may be time for it graduate to new lines of business.

Government officials in Gujarat will partner with MasterCard to pursue a goal of being the first state in India to have a digital payments system.

PayPal is enabling monthly installment for larger purchases and offering business consulting, a move that will allow the company to handle larger transactions and extend its merchant services.

French payment companies are stepping up the use technology that can spot certain types of card fraud that are not prevented by EMV-chip security.

The earliest implementations of the 3D Secure e-commerce system amounted to a password for consumers' payment cards and a link between consumer and card issuer — an idea that is growing stale in a world where consumers are able to authenticate payments with more sophisticated tech.

Skrill, an e-commerce provider based in New York, plans to offer its digital wallet as a payment option in Second Life, the once-popular virtual world game that was released in 2003.

EBay Inc. named Bonnie Hammer, chairman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment, to its board as the 10th independent director, bringing in an executive with a background in consumer and social-media content.

The crowdfunding site Kickstarter has adopted payment service Stripe for all of its transactions, replacing Amazon Payments.

Video tellers are being touted as a way for banks to increase efficiencies and cut costs while also giving customers the human interaction they desire, but some argue that speed is more important than seeing a friendly face.

Though Amazon.com's Fire Phone sputtered out as soon as it launched, the company has built a solid foundation in mobile payments that will fuel its next big moves in 2015.

Sellers using e-commerce marketplace Atomic Mail can now add Dwolla as a payment option on the checkout pages of their websites.

The payments industry is quickly adapting to new technology, new regulations and new consumer demands. Here are 15 of the industry's major transformations already in progress.

Many companies are trying to harness technology to modernize the U.S. payments system, but startups and incumbents alike forget about certain stakeholders in the industry's massive value chain.

When you are a company that started out 125 years ago as National Cash Register, you've had to reinvent yourself a few times.

The digital currency movement is headed into 2015 still looking for a "killer app" to pull Bitcoin out of obscurity. Mixing Bitcoin's technology with the virality of social media could be the winning ticket.

CheckAlt has added electronic check payments as an option for consumers purchasing gift cards through CardCash.com.

One of the challenges WePay faces in handling fundraising payments is the lack of visibility into when a given fundraising event will result in a spike of payment volume that is beyond what the vendor can typically handle.