Health and wellness apps may not much in common with small business payments and merchant services, but it was the fitness-tracking craze that lit a fire under Intuit to build an Apple Watch app for its clients.

The U.S. card networks have been trying to gain a foothold in the huge Indian payments market for years, and both Visa and MasterCard have upped the ante in the past year by opening development centers to launch new payments technology directly into the market.

Apple Pay users are fanatically satisfied — to the tune of 98% of in-store users and 93% of in-app users surveyed — making an average of 2.6 weekly in-store purchases and 2.3 weekly in-app purchases, according to the Auriemma Consulting Group.

Even an entrepreneur who specializes in products for young people can be taken aback by how fast a new mobile technology becomes an everyday necessity for its users.

Looking at the majority of recent articles around the launch of Apple Pay in the UK, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the most exciting aspect of Apple Pay is its harnessing of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) is asking the Merchant Customer Exchange to explain why Apple Pay and other Near Field Communication-based payment systems were prohibited in some MCX stores shortly after the Apple wallet's 2014 launch.

To eliminate its fraud-prone MoneyPak reload cards, Green Dot introduced a swipe-to-reload system last year that seemed more streamlined but added a new requirement — the customer had to have the card present to top it up with cash.

UGO Mobile Solutions LP, a mobile-wallet smartphone app backed by two Canadian banks, has signed up 50,000 users since December as Apple Pay becomes available in countries outside of the U.S.

The swarm of new mobile payment initiatives has left traditional bank issuers with little choice but to shoehorn modern mobile wallets into their aging infrastructure.

Demonstrating that its contactless payments technology can serve other purposes, Powa Technologies will provide its PowaTag to Vodafone customers in the U.K. as a way to add minutes to their phone plans.

China's central bank on Friday proposed a series of restrictions that may restrict overall e-commerce activity rather than simply funnel it through the state-controlled banking system.

E-commerce payment service provider Payfort has begun offering its merchant clients in Arab countries support for monthly payment plans.

YellowPepper, a Latin American mobile payments firm, named the former president and founder of defunct near-field communication (NFC) firm ViVOTech as its board chair.

DigiSeq is aggressively pushing a future of wearable computing, contending that payments should be baked into whatever device the consumer is using, rather than a specific device an issuer directly distributes or chooses to perform financial services.

The mobile point of sale market already seems overcrowded, but what's out there now is just a taste of what's to come, according to 451 Research.

The concept of a purely mobile or digital transaction is already evolving into something more. A few companies are taking the idea of a software-based payment system and bringing it into the physical world.

Switzerland's Migros is the country's largest retailer and employer, as well as the owner of a prominent local bank, giving the company an unconventional perspective on the costs and benefits of mobile payments.

Particularly in the fast-food industry, the menu of mobile capabilities is more super-sized than ever — and it's one of the rare payments trends that's actually being driven by the consumer.

American Express and Best Buy will allow consumers to make purchases on the retailer’s website using the reward points earned from their Amex spending.

MasterCard will provide tokenization technology to the Samsung Pay mobile wallet when it launches in Europe.