Mobile wallets have always been a hard sell. In many countries, credit and debit cards work well enough that consumers don't want to learn a new way to pay. But banks and technology companies are committed to bringing their wallet apps to market. In an effort to stay competitive, these companies have spent considerable effort to get their wallets to stand out not only against competitors, but against the compelling option to keep using cash and cards.

Bitcoin, the “gateway currency,” is but one application in an enormous pool of possibilities that blockchain technology presents, writes Alexander Koles, CEO and founder of Evolve Capital Partners.

Businesses should not only focus on securing payments that come through, but also pay attention to account creation and logins to prevent them from becoming additional vulnerable points of exploitation, writes Justin Lie, CEO of CashShield.

Consumers’ behavior around paying bills is often fluid and millennials put a high priority on paying bills immediately, which sometimes means with cash.

Alipay is chasing Chinese tourists to Japan, where it’s signing up a growing number of retailers and eyeing the long-term potential of the nation’s $45 billion digital payments market.

Here we take a data-driven journey into 2018 and some of the key trends that we’re likely to witness.

In a relationship-based business, it’s not enough to sell your customers a sharp tool to pay for things. You also have to help them avoid cutting themselves with it.

Bandwidth, sophisticated content and store locators can all help retailers draw and keep consumers as digital shopping and payments become mainstream, writes Herman Yau, CEO of Tend.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. will soon kick off a cash-back incentive for credit card customers who pay with a mobile wallet, and it doesn’t matter if the transaction is handled by its proprietary Chase Pay platform or Apple Pay, Android Pay or Samsung Pay.

The key to safety is not just the proliferation of investment options, but also the knowledge that hopefully accompanies it, writes Stephen Bielecki, a lawyer at Kleinberg, Kaplan, Wolff & Cohen.

Millennials aren’t the only ones who want convenience — everyone, regardless of age, wants it. Where age comes into play is just how someone defines what ‘convenience' is.

One of the indirect offshoots of Brexit is a government program that's designed to keep the U.K. relevant by lending a hand to new companies.
The program, FCA Innovate, may have a global effect by nurturing companies that aim to retire static authentication modes such as usernames and passwords.

The cloud, open development and onboarding tools should get a boost from PSD2, with mandates that banks make it easier to share payment data with fintechs in Europe.

SMBs are choosing virtual cards as their preferred form of electronic payments because they solve many of their payment challenges, while also helping them avoid the costs associated with custom software solutions designed for larger businesses, writes Blair Jeffery, COO of Noventis.

Coinbase wants loans, venture capital, payments, accounts receivable and stock trading done with electronic currency, using Coinbase instead of banks.

While at Klarna, Billingsley collaborated with Modo as part of a partnership between the two companies.

As shopping habits evolve, e-commerce and m-commerce methods such as in-app and one-click ordering are becoming increasingly popular. In addition, the exponential growth of the IoT is introducing a wealth of new payment use-cases, such as connected cars, writes André Stoorvogel, Director, Product Marketing in the Payments Group at Rambus.

More retailers are accepting mobile wallets, but few agree on what that entails. Many stores are coming up with their own wallets by building on past successes or burying payments deep under the surface of their mobile channel.

With the holidays fast approaching, the attention of watchdogs, regulators, merchant acquirers and processors needs to be on both the bottom line and the more sophisticated forms of online fraud like transaction laundering, writes Ron Teicher, CEO and founder of EverCompliant.

Interac's e-transfer system has jumped in usage, and has become a gateway for myriad other services including a collaboration with MoneyGram.