Online payments

MasterCard is unveiling an app that takes the Internet of Things to its logical extreme, stopping only one step short of becoming Star Trek's instant food replicator.

From fairly humble beginnings three years ago with the low-fee Bluebird prepaid Amex card and the Serve platform, Walmart has gotten more and more aggressive — and welcoming — with payments innovation.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s finance affiliate is seeking at least 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in a second round of fundraising ahead of a planned initial public offering, a person familiar with the matter said.

The heaviest adopters of fintech products in major global markets have a lot in common: They’re young, urban and tech-savvy, and their use of digital financial services tools could double in the next year, a study from by Ernst & Young Global Ltd suggests.

The lowest-hanging fruit for payments efficiency is governments, which handle huge volumes of payments and generally lag private corporate payments in implementing automated processing.

Valve Corp. has agreed to work with UOL BoaCompra to accept payment on its online gaming platform, Steam, in Colombia and Peru.

Of all the companies in the payments landscape, few have changed as much as PayPal has in the past year. And heading into the new year, the newly independent alternative payments company is showing no signs of slowing down.

Uber has long taught that the best way to get consumers to pay with a mobile device is to make the payment almost invisible. Now, with the help of Facebook and Braintree, Uber is applying that philosophy to the rest of its business — and if Facebook has its way, other companies will again follow Uber's example.

Merchants using Mangopay to sell through online marketplaces will have an option to set up and accept recurring payments through GoCardless' direct debit network.

Competition for commercial clients is fierce, so banks are on the hunt for ways to keep their customers happy.

Apple Inc. is reportedly working with Boku to bring a carrier billing option to iTunes users in Russia.

The "last mile" of a business-to-business payment, as funds reach a destination bank account, needs common standards and transparency as more companies eliminate paper checks and move to digital transactions.

Digital money transfer provider Xoom has launched a service for sending funds to Bangladesh.

Payments technology company BlueSnap has launched its mobile checkout gateway, the Powered Buy Platform.

Cloud-based payroll, payments and business analytics platform CloudPay has brought on Brian Radin as its chief revenue officer.

While consumers hunt for deals during the holiday online shopping frenzy, fraudsters are doing the same — using the credentials they've hoarded from any number of data breaches the past year.

Amazon.com is big enough to try things that other retailers would find too risky. Over the years it has developed many groundbreaking payment technologies and revolutionized e-commerce, but not all of its ideas have done well.

The U.S. is a long way from widespread adoption of EMV, but security analysts say the boom in online shopping—plus a surge in consumers' use of mobile devices for holiday purchases—will make it easier for fraudsters to hide their moves as they redirect their efforts from retail to online channels.

To counter the rising rate of e-commerce fraud, U.K.-based myPINpad plans to provide a virtual PIN pad for mobile-generated online transactions through the VocaLink network for the next five years.

Black Friday will mark a new milestone this year, when mobile devices for the first time will account for about half of all online purchases during the first weekend of the holiday shopping frenzy, according to a new study.