With the mantra of “attracting millennials” still pervasive in the payments industry, it is worth noting that there is a significant and growing opportunity for an even younger generation — Generation Z.

Cryptocurrencies will not gain widespread traction with corporations and governments as long as there remain crucial questions about their volatility, risk, volume and shadowy affiliations.

If you’re an omnichannel merchant, it’s critical to analyze fraud separately across your brick and mortar, online and mobile channels, in order to focus your information security resources where they are most needed, writes Michael Lynch, chief strategy officer for InAuth.

Deserve wants to deliver credit cards to students and underbanked young adults through a system that underwrites credit without relying on FICO scores and instead by judging the applicants on their future potential.

The U.S. and Canada are far behind Europe and Asia in contactless adoption in general. A handful of mass transit agencies are stirring hopes about NFC fare payments, but even these cities are taking a cautious approach to open-loop payments.

India’s push to build a broad biometrics-based consumer identity database—now 1 billion strong—has been a boon to Paytm and other mobile payments providers leveraging Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the open-architecture structure supported by India’s government.

Business payments are notoriously resistant to automation and innovation, though there are some signs of digital processing showing up in the education and science market.

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.

Much of the excitement revolves around the development of scaling solutions that may enable Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchains to reach a truly global user base, writes Nick Spanos,founder of the Bitcoin Center.

The biggest innovators in payments aren't necessarily banks, and that's a problem for JPMorgan Chase, which has such a large client base that every startup sees it as a target.

Some credit unions are beginning to offer payment services via wearable technologies, but many say it will take further declines in the pricing of those items before they are widely accepted by consumers or financial institutions.

In recent years, there's been a lot of activity in payments M&A, but a few deals stand out — some for their size, and others for their ability to transform both parties in a fundamental way.

The answer is to change the authentication framework altogether with new technologies that employ passive biometrics and behavioral analytics, writes Ryan Wilk, vice president of customer success at NuData Security.

The Wyomissing, Pa.-based firm is forgoing cash offers in favor of a more complicated plan that involves spinning the unit off to shareholders, who will then trade their stakes for shares in a Clearwater, Fla., community bank in a tax-free exchange.

Cryptocurrencies will not gain widespread traction with corporations and governments as long as there remain crucial questions about their volatility, risk, volume and shadowy affiliations.

While the advent of the Internet offered the possibility of increased global connectivity, blockchain has the potential to take this advancement to the next level, writes Sergey Ponomarev, the CEO of SONM.

To become a major payments option, the technology has to improve its voice accuracy and handling of voice in different environments.

On selected billing dates, Qualpay will automatically charge customers on an assigned plan and provide reports of the transaction activity.

Appliances, wearables, vehicles and other machines may deliver information directly to a blockchain that would validate personal and device identity.

The problem could be even worse this year, thanks to a new round of consumer data breaches, including the huge Equifax breach that exposed protected data on more than 145 million Americans, writes Rafael, executive vice president at ClearSale.