While Google continues to muck around trying to figure out what it is trying to be, two new ventures have quietly taken a divergent path to transaction bliss.

Yesterday, a venture called PaySwarm introduced its beta of an open source payments standard. The standard has been in the works for two years, but is intended to do nothing less than revolutionize payments for sellers of goods and services. As PaySwarm explains it:

This Web-native payment technology is designed to seamlessly integrate with how the Web works, not how the banks and the credit card companies have traditionally worked. The technology can be integrated directly into WordPress-based websites with support for Drupal and other content management systems in the works. It has a simple, well-defined API, like Twitter, that allows for Universal Payment on the web.

PaySwarm folks say the development process was anything but smooth. The company launched an alpha version late February in C++ and Python, two common programming languages, only to scrap the entire product and start programming again in Node.js and switching the database to MongoDB from MySQL. The open source client library, payswarm.js, is available to programmers at Github here.

Paydiant, meanwhile, scored $12 million of venture funding this week, and that is noteworthy enough. The service itself is somewhat interesting — white label mobile payments. However, what is more eye-catching is that Paydiant is specifically targeting payment processors for its white-label services. That would be the same payment processors that nearly every other startup seems to be intending to thoroughly disintermediate. The pitch from Paydiant to processors: offer mobile payments to your customers today or “one of the numerous mobile payments opportunists will enroll consumers in an intermediary service that could divert transactions away from your own processing platform.” Ain’t that the truth.

These are sophisticated plays that each in its own right could change the trajectory of payments by making available an open source payments option that completely circumvents traditional payment channels and/or gives payment processors a solid means of defense against encroachers on their turf. Either way, change is afoot — as it always is in payments.