• Fifty-six percent of all bills in the U.S. are paid online at a biller, bank, or third-party site, according to data from ACI Worldwide and Aite Group. Of these, 72% are now paid at biller sites. • Digital-payments company Proxama PLC has agreed to provide payments services to clients of payment …

• Processing-software vendor Womply has launched an analytics tool called Retention Intelligence to help acquirers identify merchants likely to leave the portfolio. • A 2-year-old startup called diningData, which processes payments and analyzes data for restaurants, announced it is now handling $1 billion in annual volume. The company is a division of Hadfield …

• Payments provider Dwolla Inc. announced a $6.85 million round of funding led by Union Square Ventures and Foundry Group. The funds will be used to expand sales and account-management operations at the company’s Des Moines, Iowa office. Dwolla also said it is moving its white-label products into a new collection of application …

It’s taken about a year, but Dwolla Inc. has now executed a strategic shift away from handling online and mobile transactions directly for consumers who want to pay merchants and each other. Instead, the 8-year-old, Des Moines, Iowa-based company now focuses on selling programming to clients that want to process …

The digital-payments revolution may finally be poised to relegate cash to the sidelines of finance. Worldwide, 471 billion so-called cashless transactions flowed through payments networks in 2015, a 52% increase since the end of 2011 and up 13% over 2014, according to numbers released this week by Retail Banking Research …

• Mastercard Inc. and investor and philanthropist George Soros announced plans “to explore private-sector solutions to societal challenges” by possibly creating a so-called social enterprise called Humanity Ventures that will apply commercial strategies to address such problems as joblessness and lack of access to health care and education. Soros might …

• The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has accepted in principle a number of proposals Mastercard Inc. has made to dispel concerns the agency expressed earlier this month about the planned $920 million merger of Mastercard and the U.K.-based payments-technology firm VocaLink. The CMA had been concerned that the merger would hand Mastercard …

• Merchant processor iPayment Inc., along with its parent company iPayment Holdings Inc., announced a refinancing with holders of its senior secured notes that company officials say should result in a “substantial deleveraging” of the company and enable it to add services and products. • Equinox Payments LLC said it supports Android Pay …

The price of Bitcoin, which soared to heady heights at the end of 2016 only to drop somewhat over the last two weeks, has been much on the minds of payments observers looking to the digital currency as an intriguing new way to pay. But is Bitcoin a medium of …

• Payment technology provider MagTek Inc. introduced tDynamo, a compact terminal that accepts chip and magnetic-stripe payment cards as well as contactless transactions in either fixed or mobile configurations. • USA Technologies Inc. said its ePort Connect Platform’s G0-S series has been certified on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network. USAT’s ePort devices …