David Heun

This week's first transaction over The Clearing House's Real-Time Payments system may be a huge step for speeding up payments in the U.S., but it also highlights the long road still ahead.

The system went live Monday with a real-time transaction between BNY Mellon and U.S. Bank. Those banks will soon be joined on the network by Citi, JPMorgan, PNC and SunTrust, which together represent the financial industry’s earliest adopters of RTP.

There is a visible shift in attack patterns immediately following a breach, from initial attacks focusing on high-value loan applications at online lenders to low-value identity testing on charities and social media sites to determine if a stolen credential will work.

For years, American Express has analyzed the more than $1 trillion in annual purchases taking place on its closed-loop network to better advise clients to formulate marketing programs.

Because wearable payments technology is still considered experimental, it is important to address security before the market for such products gets much bigger.

The spread of Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Samsung's Bixby is changing the way consumers interact with technology. Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence is doing more than ever to handle and protect payments.

Over the years, Square has evolved from a supplier of simple card readers to a provider of diverse omnichannel services. But the consumer market has always eluded it.

Many companies in the payments realm want to be seen as the next Uber, but Uber's Asian counterpart Grab is working to become something else — the next Octopus.

For much of the last decade, credit card companies and issuers have fine-tuned security to the point where if any suspicious activity occurs on a cardholder account, that cardholder will receive an alert. That same sort of transaction and behavioral analytics is starting to come into other business sectors and walks of life.

The card is Starbucks' first product with Chase since the companies agreed early in 2016 to make Chase Pay part of the Starbucks app when it became available.