John Adams

MasterCard is aggressively pursuing emerging markets, and in early February opened a technology hub in Pune, India to compete with the entrenched domestic payment networks.

Starbucks has integrated its app with technology from corporate spending management company Concur, demonstrating the vast new uses of the coffee chain's mobile commerce offering.

Samsung's plan to acquire LoopPay gives the mobile phone maker a technology that can reach more merchants faster than Near Field Communication (NFC), the technology used by Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

Mobile banking technology company Monitise is by all appearances for sale, though it may have to get creative to find a buyer.

MasterCard is testing whether the time is finally right for biometric authentication to take over as the standard of customer-facing security.

American Express will certainly suffer when its 16-year cobranding deal with Costco ends in 2016, but its executives will spend the next year building up the card brand's digital payment products to create enough opportunities to ease the company's short-term pain and guarantee its long-term health.

American Express will certainly suffer when its 16-year cobranding deal with Costco ends in 2016, but its executives will spend the next year building up the card brand's digital payment products to create enough opportunities to ease the company's short-term pain and guarantee its long-term health.

PayPal and Apple are well positioned as the mobile wallet race shifts from pure payments to broader services such as marketing and aggregation, according to Forrester Research.

Google employees are testing a service that lets them make payments by speaking their initials to the cashier, according to an article in The Information.

There's an almost endless list of reasons for payment companies to avoid doing business in Russia, but the opportunities are just as vast.

U.S. gas stations can wait until October 2017 to begin accepting EMV-chip cards or face the consequence of an increase in fraud liability, but there's already concern that the work at gas pumps could stall.

National Recovery Solutions, a Lockport, N.Y.-based accounts receivable company, has increased online payments by 25% and reduced delinquencies by 40% in less than a year by adding a Virtual Negotiator to its debt collection team.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is pushing hard against charging fees for faster Internet access, a stance that's a relief to businesses like Dwolla that use the Internet to develop and deliver payment services.

Mobile wallets are typically designed to be most useful at the point of sale. Israeli location-based technology vendor WiseSec sees an opportunity to extend a mobile app's utility throughout the store by using beacons that can sense how far away a shopper is.

By linking mobile payments with money transfers, Western Union created a new use for Apple's mobile wallet. But it must still rigidly conform to the basic requirements of an Apple Pay transaction — without a bank account, there is no payment.

There have been many attempts in recent years to convince issuers and consumers to store multiple payment accounts in a single high-tech card, typically with an emphasis on consumer choice. A new approach uses the same technology but packs in data analytics to take some of that choice out of consumers' hands.

While Visa and MasterCard aren't yet applying the same level of pressure for tokenization security as they are for EMV-chip cards, the card networks' CEOs are clear that this technology is their new expectation for e-commerce.

Efforts to apply biometric security to payments have reached the fraud-prone remittance market, as Touch ID takes hold for both incumbents such as Western Union and upstarts such as Xoom.

The rapid pace of mobile point of sale technology and advanced merchant services is pressuring traditional terminal makers to ensure that their devices are not only still relevant, but capable of evolution.

By linking mobile payments with money transfers, Western Union created a new use for Apple's mobile wallet. But it must still rigidly conform to the basic requirements of an Apple Pay transaction — without a bank account, there is no payment.