David Heun

Banks are often taken for granted in digital wallets, treated as a "dumb pipe" for funding another account. PayPal is working to provide a more welcoming atmosphere with deals recently announced with Citigroup, FIS and two other banks.

Consumers have long had options to pay for high-value purchases through monthly installments, but payments providers — from PayPal to Mastercard — have typically focused on other ways to lift purchase volume.

The percentage of EMV transactions in the United States is miniscule compared to other parts of the world, but the migration to chip cards in the U.S. is lifting the technology's global growth — now at 42.4% of all card transactions.

In expanding its work with Facebook, American Express has introduced the Add a Card feature on its bot for Facebook Messenger.

Too many data breach reports show that companies suffering compromises were unaware that cardholder data was present in their systems. The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council wants to fix this.

LevelUp has worked mostly with smaller merchants. It's relationship with the merchant-focused Chase Pay will give it access to a much larger group of retailers.

Large banks will soon launch Zelle, their person-to-person payments app. Will it succeed or will it be another name on a growing list of such platforms that never panned out?

The potential user base is huge. Tencent Holdings has 846 million global monthly active-user WeChat accounts, and more than 300 million have linked bank cards.

Consumer tastes for person-to-person payment apps differ widely from one market to another, and also change rapidly over time.

The collaboration gives Apple Pay an entry into the freelance payment market, an industry that's growing fast but underserved.