With Apple Pay gaining momentum, Google Inc. reportedly is planning to relaunch a new version of its wallet in late May at the Google I/O, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Apple Pay's contactless payment model may be straightforward and simple, but it's not the only way to move funds without cards and cash. Many companies are coming up with alternatives that work from phones, smartwatches and other devices.

Cloud-based mobile payment provider P97 Networks Inc. will partner with Fiscal Systems Inc. to enable gas pumps and station convenience stores to provide customers smart-phone based payment options.

Getin Bank has introduced a new cloud-based mobile wallet in Poland that relies on using host card emulation (HCE), an emerging form of technology that's designed to reduce reliance on mobile operators.

Starbucks has integrated its app with technology from corporate spending management company Concur, demonstrating the vast new uses of the coffee chain's mobile commerce offering.

Visa is putting a more global push behind Visa Checkout than it has in any previous attempt to create a universal digital wallet for e-commerce.

Pay.gov, the federal government's web portal for collecting payments to federal agencies, is now offering PayPal and Dwolla as payment options.

Samsung's plan to acquire LoopPay gives the mobile phone maker a technology that can reach more merchants faster than Near Field Communication (NFC), the technology used by Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

Mobile banking technology company Monitise is by all appearances for sale, though it may have to get creative to find a buyer.

Mobile payment company iZettle is countering the idea that EMV compliance increases merchant expense by offering a free version of its mobile chip-and-PIN card reader.

A joint venture formed by Norway's three dominant mobile phone carriers is testing a new, rebranded version of its mobile wallet, designed to lower the barriers merchants and consumers face when first using a mobile phone for payments.

Apple isn't the only device maker with its own mobile wallet. Though Samsung hasn't launched anything like Apple Pay, every year Samsung has added new technology to its smartphones and wearables to piece together the elements of a true mobile wallet.

Starbucks' decision to support Apple Pay within the coffee chain's mobile payment app seems like a natural alliance of two major forces in mobile payments, but it raises a significant question: Why not do the same with Square, with which Starbucks has much deeper ties?

Apple is well known for its "reality distortion field," a term applied to products that seem to appeal more because of Apple's aura of coolness than for the actual features of the product. But Apple Pay is not a case of Apple suddenly making mobile payments cool — consumers were already on board with the technology, even if they didn't know what to call it.

The Australian market has used EMV-chip cards for more than a decade, necessitating a very different approach to the mobile point of sale.

American Express will certainly suffer when its 16-year cobranding deal with Costco ends in 2016, but its executives will spend the next year building up the card brand's digital payment products to create enough opportunities to ease the company's short-term pain and guarantee its long-term health.

Fraudsters have taken to crowdfunding sites and other consumer-driven marketplaces in a new scheme designed to mask their use of stolen card data.

PayPal and Apple are well positioned as the mobile wallet race shifts from pure payments to broader services such as marketing and aggregation, according to Forrester Research.

Mobile banking apps that allow consumers to proactively lock their debit cards, or limit their cards' use to specific scenarios, could shift the way banks manage fraud and even enable them to place some of the liability on the consumer.

Google employees are testing a service that lets them make payments by speaking their initials to the cashier, according to an article in The Information.