Online payments

Seeking a stronger foothold in the North American market, the Munich-based online payment processing and gateway provider Pay.On AG has formed a new unit that operates out of New York City.

PayStand has launched an online payments platform that allows a variety of payments modes, including Bitcoin, electronic checks and cards.

Already a major card issuer in the military market, Navy Federal Credit Union is working to expand its merchant services business through new agreements with Square and TSYS.

Every year, the tech industry puts out sophisticated April Fools' Day pranks designed to look too outlandish to be real. But technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that one person's joke is another person's next big product.

Square merchants who sell in the online Square Market can now accept payments in Bitcoin.

The online money transfer provider Xoom Corp. is working with India's Housing Development Finance Corporation Bank Ltd. to allow customers to receive payments instantly into an HDFC Bank account.

2Checkout has developed a hosted online and mobile payment processing system that can plug into a merchant's existing e-commerce site.

The digital revolution has yet to sweep up the money remittance business as it has other retail payments services, but change is coming fast.

The payment processors Global Payments Inc. and Optimal Payments Plc have begun supporting MasterCard's MasterPass digital wallet.

GoDaddy, a web hosting provider, has designed an online invoicing system using the alternative payment company Dwolla's network application programming interface (API) and services.

EMV-chip technology has driven down fraud on Canada's Interac debit network, but that fraud isn't moving online. It's fleeing the country.

Intuit says it is addressing a major concern of small businesses in offering a product to enable faster online payments by automating invoices generation and data entry.

Alipay, created a decade ago as the payments unit for China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and since spun off, has established itself as a world leader in online and mobile payments.

Dublin-based gateway provider Realex Payments is working to make personal and business banking less expensive by offering payments-only banking services.

MasterCard has added China to the international roster of markets that accept the card network's MasterPass digital wallet.

Activist investor Carl Icahn, who has been calling for eBay to spin off PayPal, is now asking for eBay to conduct a partial initial public offering of the payments processor.

Global payments provider Payoneer will handle Google's "insurance" payments to consumers as part of the Google Trusted Stores program.

Acculynk will provide its payments processing gateway, PayLeap, to customers of cloud-based global e-commerce provider Ecwid.

Some of the nation's biggest banks killed a proposal in 2012 that would have enabled electronic payments to be processed on the same day they're initiated. Now the industry group that championed that plan, Nacha, is reviving its effort to speed up payments across the network that connects every U.S. bank and credit union.

In the truck business, speed matters. And nothing slows down a payment like a paper check.