Online payments

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.