Pinduoduo's controversial IPO was seemingly a world removed from western merchant acquirers, but it's yet another example of how social payments can upend conventional relationships between merchants, shopping and payment processing.

Tailoring company objectives to customers’ changing expectations is no longer a choice. Customer loyalty programs are not just the source of bringing repeated business but also the determinant of the future key players across all industries, writes Donika Kraeva, Communications Manager at Dentacoin Foundation, Netherlands.

Starbucks Corp. is joining forces with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to begin delivering its drinks and baked goods in China, rolling out an effort to stave off competitors and turn around sales in the country.

Square Inc. gave an earnings forecast for the current quarter and year that fell short of analysts’ high expectations, a rare miss for the company and a signal its spending on new products and growth are tempering profit.

Contactless payments have simplified the checkout experience around the world, allowing customers to get on with their lives a bit quicker with a simple tap of a contactless-enabled card, phone or device, writes Dan Sanford, vice president of consumer products at Visa.

London-based fintech Flux is leveraging open banking and PSD2 to work with U.K. banks and retailers to give their customers paperless receipts, digital loyalty stamps and digital cashback offers.

After peaking at $411 million in September, the amount of money the largest 17 crypto merchant-processing services received in the best-known cryptocurrency has been on a steady decline, hitting a recent low of $60 million in May.

Mobile e-commerce is growing fast, and online retail fraud levels are keeping pace with this expanded sales volume.

In the months since President Trump’s America First policies forced China's Ant Financial to abandon a proposed deal to buy Dallas-based MoneyGram, the U.S. company has forged other key partnerships to build a global digital remittance network.

Emerging faster-payment technology can address processing and settlement gaps between banks and fintechs that can cause financial challenges for families, according to Rahm McDaniel, vice president of strategic solutions for Q2 Holdings.

In its push to compete more directly with Amazon, Walmart has partnered with American Express, enabling its customers to earn and burn Amex’s Membership Rewards points for e-commerce purchases on Walmart.com.

Banks should continually try out new technologies, even after failed experiments.

For the millions of consumers who file auto insurance claims every year, many of whom use digital tools such as mobile apps to submit them, the process grinds to a halt when it comes time to receive their payment.

As smaller screens and internet-of-things devices become more prominent, credit providers will have to find a way to accept personal information without the convenience of a terminal and keyboard.

Airborne drone delivery is becoming e-commerce's version of self-driving cars: A promising but troubled technology that's nonetheless creating opportunities to change the way people make payments.

The Japanese telco Softbank is partnering with Yahoo Wallet to launch a mobile payment app called “PayPay” this fall.

From its beginnings as a standalone Starbucks Card app, the Starbucks mobile experience was always a bit different from what other companies tried to do.

AWS's recent tech summit, with strobe lights and throbbing sound system may have felt more like a music festival than a conference, but one thing was clear: the symbiotic relationship between the online juggernaut and financial services runs deep.

Since the marketplace model is relatively new, the vast majority of the merchants selling through that channel are new too, meaning they do not have the track record that banks look for when providing loans, writes Keith Smith, CEO of Payability.

The person-to-person network also saw $28 billion in payments in the quarter and it added more bank members.