Contactless payments

Visa CEO Alfred Kelly is less publicly adversarial toward market rival PayPal than his predecessor Charlie Scharf, even as Visa's push for a "single button" for online payments seems to undermine PayPal's business model.

It's no surprise that London topped the chart of "Cashless Capitals" in a recent study, considering its status as a major fintech hub of the U.K. But this wasn't enough to make it the country's contactless capital.

Microchip implants could be considered the ultimate form of mobile payment — skipping the smartphone altogether in favor of giving people bionic abilities. And a small segment of the population is already lining up to try it out.

Because Google Pay is already accepted at numerous mainstream merchants and is the default mobile wallet for many Android smartphone owners, it stands a strong chance of easing the friction of enrollment in a contactless fare system.

Credit and debit cards aren't going away, but you're going to see a lot less of them. Here's how credit unions can still stay top of wallet, even as mobile wallets and P2P payments gain ground.

To see significant growth in NFC payments in the U.S. a movement to standardize terminals across merchants would be necessary, coupled with a willingness from consumers to test, trust and use the technology, writes Beatta McInerney, business development manager for payments at ScanSource.

U.S. card issuers are adding contactless technology to credit and debit cards — but they are doing so in slow, small steps.

The Olympics draw together fans from around the globe to cheer on their fellow citizens, and having such a diverse group of people in one spot can inspire companies to experiment with cutting-edge technologies.

As an industry, we owe it to our customers and end users to deliver banking and payments that function in real-time and meet their expectations, writes Paul Kobos, senior vice president of banking & payments for Gemalto.

As billions of devices interact in trillions of transactions, autonomous payments will be required because there simply won’t be enough humans on earth to look at them all, writes Vaughan Emery, founder and CEO of Atonomi.