Online payments

China’s fastest-growing online industry segment in the first half was food delivery, as startups backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. touted discounts and marshaled armies of people to get restaurant meals to the homes of almost 300 million.

Germany-based Payworks is the latest to partner with Ant Financial’s Alipay as it works to expand the base of merchants capable of accepting the popular Chinese online and mobile payments app in Europe.

Vienna-based paysafecard, which enables unbanked consumers to make online payments using a service backed by a prepaid card, is expanding to the United Arab Emirates.

APIs allow businesses in every market to make payments online, quickly extend their own payment functionality and roll out new features with minimal effort, writes David Yohe, vice president of marketing at BillingTree.

Wirecard has released a flurry of products in recent months as it builds a global footprint, and its most recent effort focuses on risk management for small businesses that want to sell online.

Snapdeal’s co-founders are resisting the latest acquisition bid from rival Flipkart Online Services Pvt. and the company’s board plans to let all shareholders vote on the offer to reach a final resolution, according to people familiar with the matter.

The incumbents, such as Visa, Mastercard and First Data, are prepared to compete in all segments of the market, writes Subhajit Das, a visiting research fellow at the Christensen Institute from Tata Consultancy Services.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and its Indian associate Paytm E-commerce Pvt are in talks to invest about $200 million for a stake of roughly 20 percent in India’s leading online grocer, Bigbasket, according to a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations.

Once considered one of the strongest methods of ID, finger biometrics can now be copied and used to expertly defeat biometric authentication, writes Deepak Dutt, CEO and founder of Zighra.

Many companies in the payments industry position themselves as the answer to the competitive threat of Amazon. But that's not the only option out there.

Klarna recently received a banking license in Sweden, and is in the midst of an international expansion.

Ingenico's $1.7 billion deal to buy Sweden's Bambora will reduce the company's reliance on brick and mortar retail while arming it for battle in the highly competitive market for digital commerce and payments.

Because of the opaque nature of internet retailing and widely publicized data breaches, security concerns remain a pervasive gating factor to digital commerce. Key to countering this is providing consumers with the tools to monitor and control where their payment credentials are stored online.

Like almost everything else related to Amazon's incursion into retail, the company's premium loyalty program has achieved a scale that appears ready to swallow the rest of the industry.

Paytm Ecommerce Pvt., the latest entrant into India’s online retailing market, is taking a hard line with suspect merchants to avoid backer Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s reputation as a haven for fakes.

PayPal and Visa are extending their strategic agreement to Europe with a deal enabling PayPal to offer Visa debit accounts in Europe, expanding the locations where PayPal’s European consumer and business customers may make purchases with PayPal funds.

Payments services provider Worldline has agreed to acquire the Digital River World Payments unit of Digital River Inc. to bolster its online payments offerings to large merchant clients.

The number of channels consumers use to pay their bills is unlikely to decrease anytime soon, so billers that are able to check off every bill payment channel will enjoy a competitive advantage, writes Jim Lester, senior vice president of product management and strategy for biller solutions at Fiserv.

Shopify merchants selling in the U.S. will be able to list and sell products on eBay through a single dashboard via a direct integration between the two e-commerce giants that goes live this fall.

Information sharing is about to get much different in Europe, giving bank alternatives such as Klarna more to work with as they compete against the financial services establishment.