San Francisco-based Pose, one of the many companies in the cloud-based mobile point of sale market, aims to differentiate itself by eliminating its $49 monthly subscription fee.

Security breaches at trusted global corporations, such as Target and eBay are becoming a regular occurrence. Valuable customer data serves as a new currency of sorts for fraudsters, prompting the digital underground to stage well thought out attacks on a scale previously unheard of.

There's still a lot of paper used in transactions, and document automation company DocuSign's scaling up in an attempt to grab a share of paper-reducing efforts in several markets.

Mobile wallets are designed to make it easy to pay from a linked credit or debit card, but the process of using loyalty and gift cards can be a bit trickier. CashStar is working to take some of the pain out of this process for users of its gift card platform.

Supporters of Bitcoin and other digital currencies have created a trade association called the Chamber of Digital Commerce to make their voices heard in Washington.

Dell Inc. will accept bitcoins for computers, seeking to expand its payment options, Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said in a tweet.

In The Members Group's innovation lab, engineers have been tinkering with an app that lets Glass users tap to make a payment.

The newly rebranded Visa Checkout is the latest of the card network's attempts to create a more streamlined, digital payment process that moves past the plastic card. Visa and Visa Europe have embarked on many projects around the globe in recent years, targeting e-commerce, mobile payments, P2P and other use cases.

The payments industry was the most active financial technology market for mergers and acquisitions during the first half of 2014, according to a report from investment bankers Berkery Noyes.

The Justice Department's Operation Choke Point isn't really about combatting fraud, says Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association. Federal regulators simply don't like high-risk merchants, such as payday lenders and guns dealers, he says.

The banking industry is pushing back against a plan released this week by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to publicize more details about consumers' individual complaints about financial companies.

SAN FRANCISCO — It's time for credit unions to start talking a little SMAC.

Twitter has agreed to buy CardSpring, a payments infrastructure company, to fuel the transformation of its service into a platform for online commerce.

As technology gets more complex, the process of making a payment must remain simple, says The Members Group. The vendor's innovation lab is keeping this philosophy in mind when it designs payment applications for new products like Google Glass

Cardfree, a mobile payments provider run by several of the people who designed the successful Starbucks mobile payment app, is using cloud-based technology to simplify the process of deploying its technology as it eyes international markets.

Mobile point of sale provider Appetize is targeting entertainment venues and music festivals, a niche that's often a testing ground for payments technology.

Check, a bill pay app owned by Intuit, has launched a feature some financial institutions have been positioning as a competitive differentiator: the ability to pay paper bills using the smartphone camera.

The 100 new enterprise apps the two companies are creating will target specific "pain points" for the industries.

At first blush, the new Visa Checkout looks a little too similar to the V.me digital wallet it replaces. But in nearly every aspect of redesigning the product, Visa found some excess baggage that needed to go.

Facebook is testing a feature that will let users shop directly from its website.