Online payments

The digital revolution has not been kind to independent sales organizations and others in the merchant acquiring market, which has seen its long-standing business model upended by the mobile point of sale and other new technologies.

Many of the major mergers and acquisitions in the payments industry the past few years have had an underlying goal -- improve chances to make a splash in retail omnichannel payments.

Caffe Ladro's had an online store for years, but it's never been as important as it is today, as the Seattle chain faces competitors — including the notoriously tech-savvy Starbucks — that have stretched the limits of how to sell coffee online and through mobile devices.

Dickson Chu transitioned to the board after two years as the company's chief product officer, it said in a June 14 news release. In his new role he will continue serving as an advisor to the company's leadership regularly and formally.

Apple Inc.'s mobile-payment service will finally be available this fall on websites, though only through its Safari browser, shutting out users of Google's Chrome and possibly limiting Apple Pay's adoption by online retailers.

Wells Fargo has accepted two Singapore-based payments companies for its spring 2016 startup accelerator class.

Kyle Largent offered himself up as "Exhibit A" for U.S. online merchants' greatest fear: that EMV chip card adoption at the point of sale would cause fraud to spike online.

The pressure to provide a secure digital commerce experience that's cross-border and cross-channel puts an onus on traditionally tech-averse merchant providers — and creates a market opportunity ACI has been preparing to crack for several years.

Western Union has opened U.S.-to-Cuba digital money transfer through its mobile app and website.

The same multichannel shopping and payment experiences that are designed to reduce cart abandonment may also pose hard-to-spot vulnerabilities that can threaten information security.

Open development techniques have contributed to a boom in online and mobile commerce by making it possible for more applications to interact with one another, but now more attention is being devoted to how fraudsters exploit these systems at merchants, payment companies and card issuers.

PayPal's split from eBay was supposed to sweeten its appeal to merchants, but it’s also stoking rivals in the payments industry — in particular Visa CEO Charlie Scharf.

PayNearMe has long offered a service designed for consumers who prefer to use cash in a digital world, but even it has to accept the need to get on board with electronic payments.

The acceleration of the Affordable Care Act, along with the longer trend toward consumer-directed health care finance and high deductible plans such as health savings accounts, are decentralizing health care payments.

Coin-counting machines came into vogue in the 1990s when Commerce Bank started installing "Penny Arcades" in its branches throughout New Jersey. They were a huge hit for a while, but banks have soured on the machines in recent years as usage declined and maintenance costs increased.

Robots aren't yet coming to take over, but they will be taking orders — and MasterCard payments — at a handful of Pizza Hut locations in Asia.

With the rise of online card fraud and the availability of new EMV and encryption technology, a San Mateo, Calif.-based startup sees an opportunity to combine these new tools with a card reader called Chip Shield.

Google revealed a dizzying number of projects at this year's Google I/O event, and it is courting developers to turn each of them into a thriving commerce platform. Whether or not Android Pay was mentioned by name, it was an undercurrent of nearly every offering.

Google is helping developers cut steps out of the path to accepting digital payments with several key moves unveiled around the Google I/O developers conference taking place this week.

Fifth Third Bancorp has hired Citigroup's Melissa Stevens to the newly created position of chief digital officer and head of omnichannel banking.