Online payments

Adyen is working to expand its point-of-sale presence in its push to become an omnichannel payments provider, this week reaching Singapore.

Debra Rossi has been on the front lines of payments innovation since the late 1990s, when the world of e-commerce was still in its infancy.

Deborah Liu’s career in the payments industry has included roles at some of the best-known Silicon Valley giants — including eBay and PayPal — before her current job leading payments at Facebook. But for a California tech firm, Facebook is drawing a lot of its influence from overseas.

Trustly, a Stockholm-based startup whose technology enables cross-border and online payments, has partnered with optile, a German online payments company, to expand the number of European merchants it supports for direct online bank payments.

Long after e-commerce removed the biggest obstacles preventing U.S. merchants from selling internationally, there are still untapped pockets of opportunity.

As with most of the company's inventions, an Amazon checking account would more deeply embed customers into an Amazon ecosystem that provides an endless flow of data and efficiencies.

Online lenders build a seamless customer journey from screening to underwriting to origination to servicing to funding, writes Krista Morgan, CEO and co-founder of P2Binvestor.

An omnichannel payment platform offers customers a unified shopping experience across whichever channel they decide to make a purchase, whether via point-of-sale in-store, online, mobile or even telephone, writes Nick Aceto, senior vice president of technology for CardConnect.

The rise of online and mobile commerce is forcing merchants to rapidly re-engineer their checkout options, while keeping an eye on emerging models that leverage artificial intelligence to streamline shopping — or bypass the store checkout process altogether, like Amazon Go.

Even before PayPal and eBay split, their relationship wasn't perfect. PayPal may have seemed like a service that was destined to fuel sales for eBay in the early days of e-commerce, but even after the companies merged they found occasional reasons for conflict.

Even in 2018, when mobile commerce and mobile point of sale are commonplace, fintechs are able to find plenty of niches stuck in the past.

Big companies like Stripe and Visa have written off the idea of bitcoin being used for payments, citing the cryptocurrency’s inconsistent fees and speed — but Coinbase may be uniquely positioned to succeed where others were forced to give up.

Amazon recently made headlines by teaming up with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway in a collaboration that might use e-commerce tools to wring inefficiencies out of the companies' health care coverage. It's an idea that's already underway in Sweden.

EBay's recent decision to favor Adyen over PayPal doesn't spell doom for PayPal, which sees itself playing a key role in the nascent gig economy. But other payment networks also seek a slice of that pie.

Electric cars have long faced an uphill battle, though TrueCommerce and AeroVironment are trying to remove one barrier by making it easier to shop and pay for fast in-home chargers.

As owner of Whole Foods Market, Amazon is bringing one of its key strengths — swift product delivery — to its retail grocery store business.

Retailers used to be able to hold onto their physical presence as a differentiator against Amazon. In the past year, Amazon has taken even that advantage away.

PayPal's brand is so ingrained with eBay sellers that its success forced the online marketplace to buy it in 2002. Even after the companies separated, their businesses remained intertwined. So it is no small decision for eBay to instead select Adyen as its primary payment processor.

About a decade after its launch, Cambodia-based mobile money provider Wing has added a virtual prepaid Mastercard to its platform, enabling its audience of unbanked and underbanked consumers to shop online.

Tender Armor, which offers a fraud-prevention tool that requires consumers to enter a special code for each online purchase, has attracted private equity funding to expand its development three years after the company’s inception.