Even before Apple Pay burst onto the scene last year as an enabler — and, in many ways, a competitor — of bank mobile wallets, U.S. banks have been told by investors, industry experts and customers to develop their own payment apps.

One of the top lieutenants in Silicon Valley is leaving the side of one high-profile Internet executive in Marissa Mayer to join another, Jack Dorsey.

With its IPO out of the way, First Data is accelerating its focus on merchant technology, and that means luring the developers who are rapidly changing how people shop and pay.

Starbucks and Square, once the hottest couple of the payments world, are splitting up. But their relationship was never perfect; signs of trouble were obvious from the very start.

No wonder Jack Dorsey wants to keep running Square. Dorsey, the payment company's chief executive officer who also just took on the same role at Twitter, is the largest shareholder in Square by a wide margin, with 24.4 percent. The investment firm Khosla Ventures is the second-largest with 17.3 percent, according to Square's registration for an initial public offering filed Oct. 14.

While Sony Corp. is scaling back its global smartphone ambitions, the company still wants to contend with Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. on mobile payments in Asia. Its method for getting there is public transportation.

MasterCard's Craig Vosburg is trying to improve the quality of life in cities around the world.

Capital One Financial Corp. introduced a tap-to-pay mobile-payments service, becoming the first major U.S. bank to offer such functionality in competition with Google Inc.'s Android Pay.

Consumers may not be adopting contactless mobile payments in droves, the tech companies behind the world's most popular smartphones are piling on the mobile wallet bandwagon.

Starbucks Corp. is adding video screens to the drive-thru lanes of 2,400 cafes in the U.S., an attempt to revamp a decades-old ordering system that has become central to how restaurant chains interact with customers.

Amazon.com has been one of the most active companies working to remove friction from payments. This summer, it reached the finish line, removing payments entirely from a portion of its catalog.

The changing demands of consumers who are increasingly mobile, and the emergence of disruptive technology, are changing the payment model for financial institutions.

Kerv, a London-based developer of a payment-capable ring, has reached its funding goal on the Kickstarter crowdfunding site.

Merchants that sell digital goods each spend an average of $10.1 million a year on fraud-related costs — and many expect fraud and chargeback costs to rise in the coming months in the wake of the EMV chip card migration at the point of sale.

Dallas' transit system has launched a two-year project to enable contactless payments, a move the project team hopes will boost transit use and mobile wallet adoption, two areas in which supporting infrastructure is growing faster than consumer adoption.

When Apple revealed that Starbucks plans to accept Apple Pay in its U.S. stores, the move spoke less to Apple's persuasiveness and more to the fallout of the country's ongoing shift to EMV security.

EMV card acceptance has often been pitched as a catalyst for mobile wallets, since the terminal upgrades needed to accept EMV-chip cards could also enable contactless mobile payments. But mobile and EMV are not always on the same path.

Apple Inc. is rolling out its mobile-payments service for select Starbucks Corp. stores by the end of the year, and will reach 7,500 company-owned stores in 2016, the coffee chain said in a statement. KFC stores and Chili’s Grill & Bar will make Apple Pay available in next year as well, Jennifer Bailey, the Apple vice president in charge of the service, said at the Code/Mobile conference Oct. 8.

The British government and a trade association are trying to nationalize open loop contactless payments for transportation, a project of staggering scope designed to provide seamless rider transactions for buses, trains and local mass transit systems.

Mobile person-to-person payment systems are poised to grow to about 126 million adult users by 2020 with nearly 60% of all mobile device owners using the service, according to newly published data from Javelin Strategy & Research.