David Heun

Most mobile wallet providers and retailers have been hunting for the magic formula that would seamlessly blend loyalty and mobile payments, in the hopes that one would inevitably fuel the other. But it's a delicate recipe, and very easy to get wrong.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, has the ability to oversee security on its network and demand far more of its members to coordinate those efforts. But its current structure may not be the best suited to do that.

Merchants sued Visa and MasterCard in 1996 when the card networks forced them to "honor all cards," and though the suit settled in 2003, the wounds are reopening with the spread of mobile wallets.

PayPal's split from eBay was supposed to sweeten its appeal to merchants, but it’s also stoking rivals in the payments industry — in particular Visa CEO Charlie Scharf.

Consumers using mobile wallets or mobile banking apps are generally more engaged with their banks or retailers, creating a richer behavioral profile — and fraudsters are looking to exploit this by taking over these users' devices and, by extension, their bank accounts.

EMV certification provider Fime has received EMVCo approval to support the use of its global test tool for the development of payment applications that use a handset's secure element.

U.S. banks, already troubled to put in place the alliances necessary to operate in Asia and other parts of the world, have even more to worry about in light of investigators' allegations that North Korea played a role in the cyber attacks on Swift partner banks throughout Southeast Asia as well as the Bangladesh account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

Merchants are increasingly frustrated over how the EMV deployment has interfered with their legally guaranteed options for PIN debit transaction routing and authorization — and since the government gave merchants this right, the Merchant Advisory Group is appealing to the government to take a look at how things have played out.

Financial services technology provider FIS is providing UnionPay prepaid cards for U.S. consumers traveling to Asia.

With banks worldwide feeling the heat of recent cyber attacks against Swift messaging participants, and the financial telecommunication cooperative's reputation taking an even bigger hit, Swift is making public a five-step plan to tighten security measures.