John Adams

Despite the enormous hype and investment surrounding biometric technology, U.S. Bank's Elavon predicts that fingerprint, "selfie" and voice-based authentication will not render passwords obsolete anytime soon.

The heat of battle can forge some unlikely bonds, as demonstrated by MasterCard and Western Union’s collaboration with the four-year-old mobile financial service provider bKash, giving the incumbents a foothold in omnichannel payments and making them a bigger threat to other newcomers.

GORUCK sells what's called "rucking," something so unusual that one of the first things on its website is a link called "what is rucking?"

"Omnichannel" isn't just a buzzword to describe marketing and payments in different formats—it also applies to corporate dealmaking as merchant acquirers catch M&A fever.

Square will be the exclusive point of sale provider for Coachella, a large music festival, covering everything from tickets to concessions.

Seeing its opening in the mobile wallet market, Mobeewave's pushing a product that exists somewhere between the models of Square and Venmo, resurrecting a relatively old idea of having people pay each other by using their phones.

One of the biggest problems American travelers faced when chip cards became mainstream in Europe was buying tickets at self-serve kiosks in train stations. With no ticket attendant, travelers risked becoming stranded because their mag stripe cards weren't recognized.

The demise of the plastic Google Wallet card may be bad news for Google and anyone who keeps a balance with its digital wallet, but Amex and Simple both see something familiar, and attractive, in the card's audience.

Western Union is beset on all sides by newer, nimbler companies wielding emerging technology to slice overhead from cross border payments, and it’s striking back by using its global bank relationships and huge infrastructure as an advantage.

There's a certain type of payment that's prone to fraud because the payer doesn't always know when a transaction is made, or even when the relationship starts.

Peer-to-peer lending startup Ledge incorporates on millennial staples like social networking and open development to get on its feet while relying on a road paved by the financial services 'establishment' to go mainstream.

BMO is betting that newly popular biometric authentication options can solve an age-old problem—the headaches business travelers face when managing smaller expenses.

Pep Boys' early results suggest there is something to the argument that successful mobile wallets are more about relationship-building and less about payments.

Air travel and mobile apps work well together, with many passengers already using digital boarding passes and having the option to use mobile wallets to pay for food in airports. But that relationship encounters turbulence once passengers board their planes.

The international transfer business has become a game of spotting and quickly delivering new innovation, and the open development strategies that have worked so well for other types of digital commerce are finding a home at companies such as World First.

Minneapolis' new transit deployment seems limited and even old school—it's a closed loop payment system that's only available on buses and not on the Twin Cities' expanding light rail system.

As commerce gets increasingly global, the differences in payment security from country to country become more apparent.

Biometric authentication has been "replacing" passwords for a long time, but for the most part accounts still rely more on remembered credentials than physical identifiers.

The mobile point of sale market is getting more and more crowded, even as the market's largest and most established players struggle to find footing.

Retirement was good for Pamela Joseph, former head of U.S. Bank's Elavon business, but not enough to overcome the lure of a high-level executive role at Total System Services, a company rapidly transitioning into a new age of digital payments.