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.

PayItSimple USA Inc., which enables installment payments for merchants and consumers, has integrated with online payment processor Stripe.

The central bank is floating the concept of using the Internet to facilitate the direct clearing of transactions between financial institutions, which would likely diminish its own role in the U.S. payment system.

MoneyGram has extended its relationship with SBI Remit in Japan, providing services both online and through walk-in locations to customers in Japan who want to transfer funds internationally.

Sionic Mobile, an Atlanta-based mobile commerce company, released its Shop2Give app to the public today. The new app is designed to enable nonprofits to raise funds through consumers' mobile payment activity.

Mozido LLC is buying its way into China, giving it a head start as big companies like Apple also eye the country's payments market.

JetBlue Airways will become the first domestic carrier to accept Apple Pay.

Wirecard, a German digital payments company, is introducing a software development kit to provide payment capabilities via wearable devices.

Transpay is launching a mass payout feature which allows users of its cross-border payments platform to send funds to a recipient's bank account within minutes.

For two and a half years, Celine Lazorthes and her team at Leetchi, a group-payment provider for gifts and events, struggled with the regulatory requirements needed to become an e-money issuer in Europe.

Samsung is widely reported to be adding mobile-payment technology from LoopPay to its next Galaxy smartphone. Such an approach would be vastly different from that of Apple, PayPal or MCX's CurrentC — and it would address a key issue with LoopPay's own business model.