Mobile apps have become an ingrained part of air travel, providing everything from boarding passes to entertainment, and are increasingly handling payments as well.

Apple has had a rough time signing major merchants to accept Apple Pay in stores, but it has finally won the support of Best Buy, a nationwide retailer that swore off Near Field Communication-based payments years ago.

NXT-ID will start shipping its Wocket wallets to customers at the start of May, over a year after it first announced the mobile payment device.

Apple Pay, slowly and steadily, is gaining ground as a preferred method of mobile payment. And it may have a lot to do with the steady release of Apple products that support its mobile wallet.

Verifone's Vin D'Agostino insists there's a special mix of cloud technology and hardware that can address all of merchants' needs — but only if they are willing to buy it all at once.

Discover, the only major U.S. card network that did not support Apple Pay at the mobile wallet's launch, has inked a deal with Apple, eliminating some of the fragmentation in the mobile wallet's deployment.

Success seems to come easily for Starbucks' mobile payment efforts, but only because the company did its heavy lifting elsewhere.

Apple Pay represents a new cost to the issuing community. The issuers accept this because there is little choice but to operate on Apple's terms, including paying a fee to support Apple Pay.

Now that the Apple Watch has arrived, banks and technology companies are making a big effort on the wearable's small screen. Some are focused on alerts and budgeting; others take advantage of the device's unique hardware.

To address integration concerns for retailers, Bindo is connecting its iPad-based point of sale software to Powa Technologies' hardware for clients in the U.S. and Asia.

The Apple Watch officially goes on sale today, bringing Apple Pay to the wrists of many consumers, but the device's competitors — a large number of increasingly sophisticated and far less expensive wearables — are also attracting the attention of Apple Pay issuers.

The Starbucks mobile app is now used for eight million transactions per week, or 19% of the company's U.S. sales, but the biggest development is not in the numbers but the nature of the app's users.

Citigroup and AT&T have unveiled a new credit card that offers a credit for a new smartphone, potentially boosting adoption of Citi Wallet.

Increasingly, the goal of more payments providers — from megabanks like Wells Fargo to startups like YoYo — is to hide the fact that they are payments providers.

PayPal is investing heavily in technology to make sure it is properly equipped for the challenge ahead of it when its split from eBay is finalized.

Despite a series of challenges and missteps from Google Wallet's earliest days, the app has tightened its grip on the Android ecosystem and squeezed out the competition — and Google must now decide whether Apple Pay is its next target or its most unlikely ally.

Uber Technologies Inc. and Capital One Financial Corp. have joined to give the credit-card issuer's customers cheaper rides on the car-sharing service.

When a mobile wallet fails, it doesn't go away. Companies can upgrade dormant apps and remove their functionality, but the apps stay on users' phones, each one a headstone in a growing digital graveyard.

CoinTent, a San Francisco-based micropayments company, has released a product to enable media companies to sell individual articles to non-subscribers.

Amazon long ago redesigned the way consumers shop and pay online, and it envisions a retail environment where payments happen just as seamlessly and shoppers never even need to slow down to check out.