Kate Fitzgerald

The concept of a high-tech multipurse card with a built-in display may seem out of place in a world where many of the same functions can be handled by mobile wallet apps, but some entrepreneurs remain committed to the idea of a futuristic plastic card.

Target Corp. is tight-lipped on the details of its proprietary mobile wallet, but reports of the retailer's plan for a software-based wallet app early next year are adding to the concern that the mobile wallet market is becoming oversaturated with options too early in its lifecycle.

Apple Pay and Samsung Pay are coming to China in early 2016, in a potential defensive move by China UnionPay to fend off competition from domestic mobile payment rivals on the rise in China, including Alipay and Tencent.

London-based Powa Technologies has formed a 10-year alliance with China UnionPay to extend the PowaTag smartphone shopping app to CUP’s 1.3 billion credit and debit cardholders.

Banks give toasters to new customers, but what can tech companies give? The companies behind Android Pay and Samsung Pay hope to entice users with as much as $25 in gift cards (which, yes, can still be used to buy toasters).

Google Wallet was seemingly sidelined this year when Android Pay replaced it as Google’s flagship mobile payments app, but a recent update to the Wallet app shows that Google still sees potential in the aging brand.

The uncertain state of the prepaid card market doesn’t faze Texas entrepreneur Houston Frost, who has relaunched the Akimbo prepaid card, a concept he’s championed since 2011.

Wirecard Group and Alipay are collaborating to provide European retailers with barcode technology enabling Chinese tourists to make point of sale payments using the Alipay mobile wallet app.

Versatile, high-tech digital gift card sales are going strong for this year’s holiday season, but in the latest sign that plastic cards many never die, eBay has partnered with gift card giant InComm to sell traditional gift cards online that will take up to 10 days to arrive by mail.

Dealing with late and missed payments from creditors is a chronic complaint of small businesses, who are often stretched too thin to chase down money owed to them. But a U.K.-based startup aims to attack that problem with YayPay, an automated invoicing platform with a bill-collections feature that launched this week in the U.S.

Align Commerce, a San Francisco-based firm focused on cross-border payments for small and midsize businesses while expanding the use of blockchain technology to move currency, has hired Intuit veteran Jay Hansen as compliance officer and general counsel.

Vodafone is extending M-Pesa to Ghana, making it the 11th country to offer the mobile money service to unbanked consumers in developing markets in Africa, India and Europe.

American Express’ small merchant card acceptance has been generally low, though that performance could improve through a partnership with Moneris, Canada’s largest acquirer.

The U.S. is a long way from widespread adoption of EMV, but security analysts say the boom in online shopping—plus a surge in consumers' use of mobile devices for holiday purchases—will make it easier for fraudsters to hide their moves as they redirect their efforts from retail to online channels.

Mobile payment users are still in short supply, and the growing range of options may be seen as too chaotic for consumers who haven't yet used a mobile wallet.

Black Friday will mark a new milestone this year, when mobile devices for the first time will account for about half of all online purchases during the first weekend of the holiday shopping frenzy, according to a new study.

Merchants have long known card network rules permit them to charge a different price for accepting cash versus cards, but outside of gasoline retailers, most merchants haven’t done much about it.

A penny per transaction may be enough to cover issuers' costs of preventing credit and debit fraud now, but that math could change if fraud incidents spike.

KeyBank will soon get to test the power of years of investments to its operations and redesigns to rewards as it moves its credit card operation back under its own roof.

Citigroup is doing away with its cobranded ExxonMobil MasterCard and on Aug. 31 will introduce a new private-label gas card whose name, the ExxonMobil Smart Card, could be a bit misleading to payments-industry insiders in that it is not an EMV chip-card.