Online payments

Facebook's Libra project didn't come from nowhere. The social network has a long history of experimenting with digital payments, and launched a separate (and ill-fated) digital currency a decade ago.

Several prospects, including JPM’s Gordon Smith, are reluctant to take on a thankless job; lower interest rates, quiet trading will yield disappointing results.

Developers of new payment methods often court big retailers to show off their brand, but the card networks' universal buy button is launching with security features designed for smaller shops.

Much is made of the U.S. e-commerce market given the influence of Amazon and its peers. However, when it comes to sheer size in both population and volume, Asia holds significant advantages.

Payment network tokenization should sound appealing to every online retailer because it relieves friction and releases them from much of their risk, liability and compliance burden. The trick is achieving scale from both a technical and business agreement perspective, writes Ammar Faheem, vice president of digital payment solutions for North America at Gemalto, a Thales company.

Elavon is partnering with online store software company ePages to meld online and in-store technology for small to mid-size retailers in the U.K. and Ireland with other markets to follow.

Visa's tokenization began as a way to shield digital commerce and has developed into a major catalyst for Visa in landing partnerships.

While the European Union positions itself as one common, homogeneous market, the reality is that the European e-commerce market is very diverse with both leaders and laggards.

Elavon has joined a collaboration of travel industry partners to streamline the way online travel agencies pay airlines using virtual cards.

Amazon is undeniably a juggernaut in the realm of e-commerce and digital payments — but its journey was filled with missteps and failed experiments.

A dynamic digital identity that can work across functions and channels has to start somewhere. To get into digital ID at the ground floor, more companies are pushing to address identity risk when onboarding new accounts.

Mastercard's new rules for halting unfair subscription billing have been in place for a month, prompting e-commerce platform provider LimeLight to provide a toolkit to help online merchants comply.

Amazon.com Inc. said it was hit by an "extensive" fraud, revealing that unidentified hackers were able to siphon funds from merchant accounts over six months last year.

There are emerging payment innovations and strategies, such as card controls and online payment technology and analysis, that can help banks and other financial institutions connect with small businesses, writes Erik De Kroon, CEO and co-founder of Yordex.

By using one anonymous, streamlined platform, it is easy to conduct B2B commerce anywhere while keeping transactions digital, allowing both parties to connect without leading to fragmentation within the market, writes Derek Wall, founder, CEO and CTO of HUBX.

Digital payments developers have targeted video game platforms and their players as fairly fertile ground for integrating payment methods directly into game consoles or apps, but up to now the misses have outnumbered the hits.

The restaurant food delivery market is booming, as it caters to America’s growing desire to get on-demand meals for a dine-at-home lifestyle. This trend is influencing how restaurant orders are placed and paid for.

PayPal has had an on-again, off-again relationship with eBay since the company split off as a unit of the e-commerce marketplace more than four years ago.

Venmo has more than 40 million active users, PayPal has revealed for the first time. This finally gives the market a sense of how popular Venmo is, and sheds a little light on how it compares to the bank-run Zelle service.

As part of its formal spinoff from consumer lender Affirm, B2B e-commerce platform Resolve is launching automated payments that offer extended net terms for product buyers.