The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), commonly referred to as Metro, will launch a contactless payment pilot to open doors for open-loop mobile wallets to be used for transit fare.

Snapchat, in unveiling a person-to-person payment function this week through a partnership with Square Inc., joins a growing number of companies treating social media accounts as payment instruments.

Square, which made a short-lived attempt at digital gift cards in late 2012, is debuting a new gift card service today with a heavy emphasis on an older payment instrument: plastic.

V-Key, a mobile security provider in Singapore, has received a $12 million investment from the Ant Financial Services Group, the Chinese financial services company that operates Alipay.

Conferma has integrated the MasterCard inControl service into its global travel payment network.

A week after making Discover the first credit card offered in its mobile bill-pay service, PreCash Inc. has already seen a spike in the use of Evolve Money, which previously accepted only debit cards.

Snapchat, a photo-based messaging service, has added a payment capability based on Square Cash, Square Inc.'s person-to-person payment system.

Apple Pay's launch about a month ago was accompanied by an almost unprecedented amount of hype and media attention, but it takes more than buzz to shift the world to mobile payments, and Apple's job is far from over.

Apple Inc. said customers in China can now use the country's most popular payment card for transactions on the App Store, as the iPhone maker seeks to woo users in the world's largest smartphone market.

McDonald's Corp. has tested a wide range of mobile payment technology throughout the world, and its ability to do so is rooted in an old decision based as much on customer service as technology.

As Apple Pay creates more consumer and merchant awareness of mobile payments, Benefit Mobile Inc. figures the time is right to focus on enabling charitable donations from smartphones.

Business-to-business payments are ripe for disruption and there are plenty of startups innovating in the space today. These newcomers, after being thwarted by corporate red tape, are finding a more welcoming audience from small businesses.

Mobile tech providers are racing to incorporate EMV chip-and-PIN or chip-and-signature security into their offerings. But many of these companies are taking fundamentally different approaches to linking EMV and mobile technology.

The co-founders of Mopay have officially joined the executive team of Boku, which acquired the German company last month.

New Zealand-based financial services institution Westpac has contracted Gemalto, a Dutch digital security company, to provide its mobile payment technology to Westpac's customers.

Google Inc., citing a maturing e-commerce market, is telling merchants it will end support for its digital goods application programming interface. As such, they need to find another processor soon.

Co-branding credit card partnerships has never been smooth sailing, but competition has clearly gotten tougher amid Apple Pay's launch.

Banks and merchants are under threat to lose millions of dollars in investment in their apps by allowing them to become obsolete because they don’t provide the most desired functionality of all: Payment.

In what amounts to eliminating password use and evolving the Verified by Visa and SecureCode online authentication processes, MasterCard says a new security protocol it is developing with Visa could be implemented next year.

For payment technology developers, the stakes couldn't be higher as the FCC develops new rules that could support or eliminate net neutrality, a system in which Web access is equal for most users, regardless of size.