When newly acquired card customers from HSBC’s U.S. card program and ING’s online bank are folded into Capital One Financial Corp.’s existing base, they will have a rapidly expanding array of digital transaction and payments channels from which to choose.

The battle for supremacy in mobile person-to-person payments is raging. To date, its primary ordnance has been limited to the press release and the corporate event, most of them volleyed by big-name operators of existing payment networks, such as PayPal Inc., Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide and Google Inc.

Instead of dipping its toe into the mobile-payments pool, Heartland Payment Systems Inc. intends to make a splash with a retail application that can enable a merchant’s employees to complete sales transactions anywhere in or out of the store.

Mobile-banking applications fared better than retail, productivity and social-networking apps, but banks still have work to do to protect customer data on mobile devices, a security audit released Aug. 8 suggests.

WESTbahn Management GmbH has selected VeriFone Systems Inc.’s PAYware Mobile Enterprise and managed-services products for use with its mobile-ticketing validation and payment operations when the company’s rail service begins in December, the payment terminal-maker announced Aug. 8.

Square Inc.’s mobile card reader is under fire again for its security.

Since 13-fold growth in business activity inside of a year is almost never wrong, Bank of New Zealand developed an Android app after Android visits to its mobile web browser spiked explosively in recent months.

CorFire is working to show it is ready to make a name for itself in mobile payments.

Verity Credit Union, the latest customer of mFoundry's mBanking solution, has come out with the news that 6% of its customers began using mobile banking within three months of the credit union offering the service.

For a large international operation such as RBS' wholesale banking unit, drawing a mobile roadmap means scaling the knowledge curve posed by fast-developing new devices and technology to find the best match between innovation and client demand.

Digital payments have been the primary enabler of new financial services in Africa, as evidenced by the M-PESA-driven development of an entire financial ecosystem in Kenya. Further south, MTM MobileMoney has developed an electronic commerce payments system that enables debit payments, which should decrease seller discomfort with the credit-based digital commerce that has prevailed in that country.

One of the most significant challenges to widespread adoption of Near Field Communication-enabled mobile payments has been determining how the card brands, issuers, mobile operators and handset manufacturers will divvy up transaction revenues.

To help distribute its Serve digital payment and wallet service, American Express Co. on Aug. 1 announced a deal in which Verizon Wireless will integrate the platform into many of its mobile phones and tablets.

While the media, analysts and other industry observers all devote enormous amounts of time and attention to mobile banking and mobile payment developments, of which there seem to be new several new ones each day, there’s a quieter channel change going on that’s received little attention. That is the growth in online banking.

Spend some time in Apple's App Store browsing the free online banking apps for the iPad, and you see a quite a few iPhone apps masquerading as iPad apps, failing to take advantage of the iPad's bigger screen and ability to host more sophisticated graphics.

Observers have speculated that now that ISIS has signed on card networks Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express to work with its telecom members AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon on mobile payments, it will muscle out competing scheme Google Wallet. To date, Google has signed on one card network, MasterCard, and one telecom operator, Sprint, as well as Citi, First Data and sixteen merchants as tenant partners.

Suvidha Starnet Pvt. Ltd. will invest more than 5 billion rupees (US$113 million or 80 million euros) to expand the operations of its Beam mobile-wallet service, a sign of the growing confidence in India’s mobile-payments market.

Varying opinions exist on how quickly mobile payments will grow in the U.S., but payments executives generally believe the technology could become a mainstream option for purchasing goods and services within 36 months, new survey data suggest.

The smartphone market is maturing rapidly, but banks risk getting left behind because a growing number of users consider the channel to be unsafe for financial transactions.

USAA has already processed nearly $4 billion in mobile banking transactions in the two years it has offered its Deposit@Mobile smartphone app. The company is now expanding this service, which lets customers deposit checks by snapping pictures of them with their mobile device, to the iPad 2 and plotting a new wave of digital banking products.