Kate Fitzgerald

USA Technologies, a provider of payments technology enabling card and mobile payments at vending machines in the U.S., is buying Cantaloupe Systems, which has its own line of vending machine payments solutions in the U.S. and other markets, for $85 million.

For most retailers heading into this year’s holiday-season sales crunch, the epic Equifax data breach was only the latest in a series of escalating threats that are having a profound effect on the way they handle payments.

Customer service is steadily expanding within Facebook separate from its payments operations, as part of “an ecosystem for buying.”

Jeanne Tisinger spent three decades working at the CIA, where her most recent position was deputy director overseeing the agency’s physical and cybersecurity and information technology spanning more than 100 countries.

The iPhone X is a very different type of smartphone, shedding much of Apple's familiar hardware design and adding new, unproven features. Here are some of the ways the iPhone X is changing mobile payments.

In the U.S., Visa Direct has emerged as one of the few go-to tools for fast payments in a market that is overdue for such options. The product's true test begins now, as Visa launches it in Europe, where faster payments options are far more plentiful.

Amazon has introduced an augmented reality tool, giving customers an easy way to see how an item would look placed on any particular surface using a smartphone camera.

Since Zelle's earliest days as the clearXchange network, the banks behind the P-to-P platform have promised that it could have a role in the business world. U.S. Bank has begun the next chapter by offering Disbursements via Zelle.

Three of Australia’s largest banks—Wespac, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the National Australia Bank—have joined forces for a mobile wallet joint venture called Beem, with person-to-person payments as the first use case.

Certain prepaid debit card issuers that didn’t initially adopt EMV technology — because of a lower perceived security threat for these limited-use cards — are now going the EMV route.

PNC Financial is joining the mobile wallet trend with PNC Pay, timed to capitalize on some of mobile payments’ latest innovations.

London is battling other cities, which are trying to use the political uncertainty of the U.K.'s exit from the European Union to lure payment startups and other financial technology companies.

The gig economy is one of the most demanding business sectors in terms of technology, speed and security. All of these factors play into how these companies handle payments.

Many companies in financial services say they want to be the next Uber. But the reverse may also be true, with the ride-sharing company adding a cobrand card that can be managed from within the Uber app.

HSBC Bank USA is the latest to issue a credit card made of metal, designed for affluent customers who travel often.

Giving merchants direct access to third-party software isn’t new—First Data’s Clover unit introduced the concept three years ago—but Vantiv is giving its approach a custom-development spin with an app marketplace.

The U.S. and Canada are far behind Europe and Asia in contactless adoption in general. A handful of mass transit agencies are stirring hopes about NFC fare payments, but even these cities are taking a cautious approach to open-loop payments.

India’s push to build a broad biometrics-based consumer identity database—now 1 billion strong—has been a boon to Paytm and other mobile payments providers leveraging Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the open-architecture structure supported by India’s government.

Facebook Messenger now supports person-to-person payments and customer service for PayPal, expanding the funding choices for repaying friends and family and the channels available to PayPal users sending P-to-P payments.

In recent years, there's been a lot of activity in payments M&A, but a few deals stand out — some for their size, and others for their ability to transform both parties in a fundamental way.