Payment processing

The U.S. may be undergoing a sea change in attitudes to contactless cards.

Consumers are more than willing to share retail payment information, geolocations, as well as Uber, OpenTable, Facebook, and Twitter information. However, they have high expectations for what they receive in return, writes Lisa Woodley, vice president of FSI customer experience for NTT Data Services.

PayPal has been working to expand Venmo's audience beyond millennials for more than a year, a strategy that it hopes to further with instant transfers.

Kelley Knutson has been promoted to senior executive vice president of Total System Services Inc. and president of Netspend, the company's prepaid debit card unit.

Tightening its connections to restaurants with a brisk delivery business, Square has acquired a longstanding Dallas-based local food delivery service to add to its Caviar food-ordering platform.

In the ever-changing era of cyber threats against payment and personal data, it is dangerous for companies or financial institutions to spend a lot of time or money establishing defenses only against external threats.

E-commerce merchants are juggling several challenges at once, creating potential business-threatening gaps Worldpay and Vantiv say can be bridged by their merger.

Now that bitcoin's market spike has made the alternative currency a household name, it's linked to wild market swings, bubble-level valuations and onerous fees, with the most obvious fixes likely furthering bitcoin's problems rather than solving them.

If e-invoicing were adopted by more organizations, many of the issues that currently cause late payments would naturally evaporate, leaving leaders more resources to seek out and identify opportunities for business improvement in this year and beyond, writes Richard Hurwitz, CEO of Tungsten Network.

The company plans to move into more retail payment processing as part of a broader diversification strategy that includes the acquisition of Cayan.