Retailers

Mobile payments company I Love Velvet plans to win the business of international merchants by combining its mobile point of sale offering with broader e-commerce and security compliance tools.

Cloud-based wallets, QR code wallets and other software-based wallets seem to be shoving Near Field Communication hardware out of the spotlight. But reports of the death of NFC, which enables contactless payments from many mobile devices, have been greatly exaggerated.

DoubleBeam, a white-label payments provider, has started the New Year working to fix a bug that crashed the reporting server used by GoPago, which DoubleBeam purchased last month.

E-commerce technology provider Shopify has launched a redesigned version of its iOS mobile app, adding features designed to enable store management and mobile payments.

The processor Global Payments Inc. now allows merchants to accept donations at the point of sale through an agreement with Digital Processing Solutions.

As more payments companies seek the next big thing, they are finding that mobile payments tech is due for a makeover, and a lot more attention surrounds digital currency such as Bitcoin.

From a consumer's perspective, the Merchant Customer Exchange mobile payment initiative ended 2013 in much the same way as it ended 2012 - with many big-name merchants signed on, but no product available to make payments in stores. Behind the scenes, MCX has made greater strides.

With 2013 coming to a close, here's a look back at some of our favorite contributions to the PaymentsSource blog this year.

Synqera treats its home turf of Russia as a proving ground for new point of sale technology, but it has global ambitions.

DoubleBeam, a white-label payments provider, plans to offer a complete mobile commerce platform for both its online and brick-and-mortar merchant customers through its December purchase of GoPago.

Moscow-based cross channel payments provider Qiwi announced it has acquired 100% of Blestgroup Enterprises Limited.

In the past few years, the payments industry has experienced a flood of new offerings, from consumer-facing giants like PayPal and Google to Silicon Valley startups such as Square.

"Operation Choke Point," the federal government's campaign against online payday lenders and collections agencies, is unjustly attacking third-party payment processors, an association official says.

MoneyGram will extend its agreement to provide services in more than 600 Albertsons locations in the U.S.

As mobile wallets mature, so will attempts to use the technology to marry payments and marketing, says Fiserv's Matt Wilcox.

Lisa Shipley, president of Transaction Network Services (TNS), will lead the board of directors and service as president of the Women's Network in Electronic Transactions (W.net), an organization that provides networking, mentoring, career development and education programming for women in the payments industry.

Merchant Warehouse has seen a lot of momentum these past three months as small and medium-sized merchants adopt its Genius payment acceptance and customer engagement platform, which launched to the general public in January.

The credit-card issuer has agreed to loosen its restrictions on fees charged by retailers to consumers, following a similar move by Visa and MasterCard.

Oink, which was previously called Virtual Piggy, is ready to expand its youth-oriented online payments business to include merchants with a physical presence.

Retailer Target Corp. is investigating a massive data breach that may have affected the card data of millions of bank customers, according to security blogger Brian Krebs. The breach of credit and debit card records is said to have begun on or around Black Friday 2013, the day after Thanksgiving.