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.

On-card biometrics is the final piece of the puzzle to bring trust and security to contactless payments without compromising convenience, writes Lina Andolf-Orup, global product marketing manager at Fingerprints.

Mastercard knows the more time consumers spend on their mobile devices—often deliberately blocking ads—the less likely they are to see its iconic “Priceless” ads, even if those ads support a charitable cause.

The U.S. may be undergoing a sea change in attitudes to contactless cards.

Mastercard is teaming with SIX Payment Services to enable cashless payments at the Hahnenkamm, a top European ski race in Kitzbühel, Austria, to speed up service and eliminate lines.

Visa is digging deep into the question of whether transit fare payments can influence habits in other settings.

With a solution that addresses the unique security, transaction speed and integration requirements of the transit environment, EMV contactless open payments for transit can become a reality and change our public transportation experiences for the better, writes Randy Vanderhoof, director of the U.S. Payments Forum.

Transit transactions will increase card use and loyalty, and will generate the same sort of reputational boost London enjoys with Oyster, writes Andrey Tikhonov, director of payment technology for Infinite Peripherals.

New York plans to dramatically digitize its subway system, phasing out its iconic MetroCard to install contactless tap-and-go technology, bringing a dose of the 21^st century to a system that dates to 1904 but often feels even older than that.

KRACK, combined with other attacks, allows for the reading of pain text username, passwords, credit card numbers as well as the injection of code including ransomware, writes Timothy Crosby, senior security consultant for Spohn.

The slow and difficult EMV migration has slowed major adoption of contactless cards, but there are signs that momentum may be turning around.