Payment processing

Visa has hired Ryan McInerney to be its president. McInerney, previously the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase's consumer bank, fills a position left vacant since John Partridge retired in March. Visa also appointed Elizabeth Buse and Bill Sheedy to new roles.

As MoneyGram International sits solidly as the world's second-largest money transfer business, its growth strategy is focused on diversifying its product suite and capturing market share that remains untapped by MoneyGram and rival Western Union.

Sprint's Boost Mobile prepaid phone service developed a mobile wallet as a way to provide financial services for its underbanked target audience.

EBay Inc. said PayPal will be available in 2 million retail stores this year as it takes on Square Inc. and Intuit Inc. in the market for mobile payments.

Virtual Piggy is adding merchants in the U.K., setting up its youth money management and ecommerce system at Toy Galaxy and Toadstool companies.

ShopKeep POS designed Surround 360, its iPad point of sale software, to protect independent sales organizations from competitors out to "steal" merchant clients.

ScanPay's card-scanning technology, which allows consumers to enter their card credentials by scanning the card with a phone's camera, was designed to reduce cart abandonment at mobile shopping sites.

Google and Square have entered the notoriously challenging person-to-person payment field, sidestepping one of the major hurdles other companies have faced: signing up new users.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Starbucks Corp. are among 19 retailers opting out of a $7.25 billion antitrust settlement with Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. over fees charged to merchants to process credit-card transactions.

Swipely has secured a $12 million Series B round of financing, which will fund its nationwide expansion, the payments and marketing company announced today.

Following the devastating tornado that struck Moore, Okla., organizations involved in the rescue and recovery efforts are relying on mobile payments technology to accept text message-based donations from the public.

Google Checkout, the online payment service launched in 2006 and combined with Google Wallet in 2011, will shut down for good on November 20.

Licensed gun dealers are finding it increasingly hard to accept card-not-present credit card or debit card transactions, but companies such as Tasker Payment Gateways are not gun-shy when it comes to serving the firearms industry.

Many merchants are still wary about accepting bitcoins, but new vendor partnerships and a maturation of the companies that handle bitcoin exchanges address some of the virtual currency's riskier aspects.

A person-to-person payment method called Square Cash has surfaced on Square's website, less than a week after Google announced similar capabilities through Gmail and Google Wallet accounts.

NCR Corp. is integrating SCVNGR's LevelUp mobile payment system with its Aloha POS system for restaurants.

While many still see Bitcoin as an unrealistic payment method, venture capitalists say there are clear use cases for the decentralized cryptocurrency in micropayments, international remittance and charity.

Some consumers in London reportedly experienced problems with the contactless payment system U.K. retail giant Marks & Spencer recently expanded into all of its 644 stores.

MasterCard is part of a joint venture that will launch the Zuum mobile payments service this month. The venture is touting Zuum as the first service of its kind in Brazil.