Payments

Many disruptive technologies come from startups, but just as many seem to come from companies that have been around for decades. Whether developing a new system in-house or providing a necessary proving ground for a partner, these older companies are bringing fresh innovations to the payments industry.

RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif. — Consumers swiped and clicked their plastic over Thanksgiving weekend, as analysis from multiple sources found credit spending increased almost 13% while debit spending increased nearly 7%, compared with last year.

Dwolla is expanding its direct bank transfer services to allow its account holders to send payments to a recipient's e-mail address for automatic routing to a bank account.

Microsoft is working with Bitcoin merchant services provider BitPay to allow customers to seamlessly exchange the virtual currency when loading money into their Microsoft accounts.

As consumer credit card holders in the United States continue to rack up increasing amounts of debt, some industry experts fear the situation may be close to a "tipping point" that could culminate a new wave of defaults and delinquencies.

The global e-commerce payment gateway provider BlueSnap has developed new application programming interfaces (APIs) to help merchants increase sales as the holiday shopping season nears.

All over the world, consumption is undergoing a major shift. Consumers no longer need to choose between local specialty goods produced within their own communities or mass produced products manufactured abroad.

A new Bluetooth standard limits how beacons can track and deliver messages to people near stores, but this may not be a death knell to proximity-based payments and marketing.

Security vendor Retail Decision Plc (ReD) is working with First Data to deter card-not-present fraud in Mexico.

FitPay Inc., a wearable technology provider, is betting that the only way to change consumer behavior is to eliminate consumer behavior.

As card networks develop tokens to stand in for account numbers in online and mobile commerce, they may be able to standardize the experience across all companies that handle payments, said Mike Matan, head of global network business at American Express.

Rallying its members to wipe out passwords, the Faster IDentity Online Alliance — an organization of more than 150 payments and technology businesses — released standards Dec. 9 for multi-factor e-commerce authentication.

Consumer credit card debt in the United States has been rising in recent years, although as the labor markets improve, defaults on such cards have fallen to multi-decade lows.

?Square Inc. has hired former Visa marketing executive Kevin Burke to lead its customer acquisition initiatives in retail, paid, Web and events marketing channels.??

Banks would have to upgrade their systems to accommodate faster transactions, and originating banks would pay the receiving financial institutions a fee to cover those costs, under a plan from Nacha, the industry group that sets ACH rules.

Three former stars of the National Football League are acting as "ambassadors" for a credit card promotion by $18.5 billion Pentagon Federal Credit Union.

MasterCard is investing in and partnering with card technology company Dynamics to embed greater function into U.S. payment cards, a mission that has sputtered in past years.

The Aschheim, Germany-based payments company will process subscriptions for the TV station's Sky Starter and Sky Film packages.

Mobile payment share for Alipay, the payment affiliate of Alibaba, rose to 54% of payments in the first ten months of 2014 from 22% all last year.

Visa and Kofax are attempting to simplify complex invoice payments in Asia by introducing technology into processes that have long been handled manually.