If Apple Pay comes to Spain anytime soon, supermarket chain Mercadona will be ready for it.

Executives at card networks and issuers are concluding that tried-and-true marketing methods can still expand card acceptance in an increasingly digital world.

YapStone has named technology and payments systems veteran Daniel Issen as its new chief technology officer.

Experts from the banking, retail and technology sectors gathered last week for SourceMedia's annual Card Forum and Expo, sharing their predictions for the payments industry's next step. Some were involved in Apple Pay from day one; others are looking past it to the next big thing.

Papa John's is integrating its mobile and online checkout process with Venmo, a PayPal-owned system that fuses mobile and social networking to enable person to person payments.

From RBC's perspective, the future will be better served by multi-purpose devices like the Apple Watch, which can store multiple card accounts and be controlled by the consumer from a Bluetooth-connected smartphone.

Only 10 people in the bank were allowed to know what the project's goal was, and the other Apple Pay partners were known only by code names. But even though Apple was running the show pre-launch, U.S. Bank had a daunting task ahead of it once the restrictions lifted and Apple revealed its mobile wallet to the world.

After a making a number of adjustments to overcome a shaky start, Google Wallet is starting to build momentum with merchants, this week adding Shopify, Dunkin Donuts and Seamless to the roster of companies supporting the search company's mobile wallet.

With so much focus on specific mobile devices and form factors for delivering a payment, banks and issuers can lose sight of the fact that consumers will ultimately decide how and when they will pay, said Cheryl Guerin, executive vice president and U.S. product and solutions lead for MasterCard Inc.

CHICAGO -- A gender disconnect in mobile payments is emerging as one of the persistent obstacles to the new technology.

E-commerce gateway Klarna will soon launch in the U.S., the latest Swedish payment company to seek market share in the country.

Mobile money transfer platform nTrust has expanded its merchant partner network, adding fashion retailers, antique stores, food trucks and bars.

The Asia-Pacific region has historically been the last target for U.S. corporate expansion. But fast advances in m-commerce are proving irresistible for outside payment companies.

The adoption of new anti-fraud card technology is prompting more community banks to consider supporting Apple Pay.

Seamless' strategy for its mobile wallet, SEQR, is simple and obvious: You can't scale internationally if you don't launch a product internationally.

Groupon may not have its own mobile wallet, but it has a strong foundation to build on: The 110 million downloads of its daily-discount app, plus the merchants using its Breadcrumb mobile point of sale system.

Merchants are making a new argument in their years-long battle with banks over swipe fees, saying Apple Pay has locked them out of additional routing options mandated by Dodd-Frank.

Rent payments are among the few lingering paper-based transactions, though a subset of the payments industry is shaking the trees to find ways to change that.

Europe is home to many innovative and disruptive banks, telcos and technology firms. Some of these are deploying mobile wallets that have the potential to span the entire continent.

French terminal maker Ingenico Group will use Intel Corp. technology to develop a mobile tablet that supports EMV chip card and Near Field Communication contactless payments.