Disruptors

In what could bring major visibility to the emerging market for wearable payments, Visa today unveiled an NFC-enabled piece of jewelry it’s giving to 45 Olympic athletes on Team Visa.

PayPal's split from eBay was supposed to sweeten its appeal to merchants, but it’s also stoking rivals in the payments industry — in particular Visa CEO Charlie Scharf.

PayNearMe has long offered a service designed for consumers who prefer to use cash in a digital world, but even it has to accept the need to get on board with electronic payments.

Well before the mobile payments explosion, incumbents were already focused on how to respond to nonbanks "piggybacking" on banks' payments infrastructure. As the consultant behind a 1994 banking industry report on the threat put it, "there is no time for delay."

The Federal Housing Administration's loan sales are drawing more attention after a recent critical report said it was resulting in vulnerable borrowers losing their homes.

As more mobile apps and businesses push plastic payments to the background, they also give prepaid card accounts a chance to reclaim the spotlight.

Robots aren't yet coming to take over, but they will be taking orders — and MasterCard payments — at a handful of Pizza Hut locations in Asia.

The nascent industry's early success will mean very little if these new companies don't take necessary steps to position themselves for the long term.

Google revealed a dizzying number of projects at this year's Google I/O event, and it is courting developers to turn each of them into a thriving commerce platform. Whether or not Android Pay was mentioned by name, it was an undercurrent of nearly every offering.

If the DAO, an automated, leaderless "company," lives up to the hype, it could radically transform corporate finance and governance. But many wonder if the entity's record crowd sale is kosher under securities laws.