Disruptors

Who is Microsoft Wallet for? With just 1.6% of the U.S. smartphone market as of January, it's unlikely that even Microsoft believes Windows Phone users are a huge untapped audience for mobile payments.

Facebook is poking its fingers into a lot of seemingly unrelated businesses, but commerce is always at the heart of its efforts. Here are some ways Facebook is building a new foundation for payments.

A growing number of marketplace lenders and other fintech companies say they no longer use FICO scores or are using them in a limited way. The open question is whether their alternative methods will be more effective.

Nonbanks now set the digital banking experience bar, but in less than a decade large banks will have swallowed them up and will have become digital financial superstores.

The Bank of England is among the central banks exploring possible uses of blockchain technology. In a recent speech, a BOE official noted how it would open access to central banks beyond commercial banks. "Everyone – including individuals – would be able to hold such balances," he said.

Throw Cathy Bessant of Bank of America a question about a hot tech topic, and she's got answers. Blockchain? She loves it but is still waiting for its use case. Patents? The law is making us be aggressive. Swift? A call to action. And that's just the start.

Embracing technology that gives innovators access to their platforms will provide banks with the upgrade they sorely need.

MFA Financial has carved out an impressive niche for itself by buying re-performing and nonperforming residential mortgages and securities.

Well-established tech giants like Amazon and Google pose a more formidable threat to banks than the thousands of startups populating the fintech market.

As PayPal has grown over the years, it has made enemies. Some of these rivalries were short-lived, while others persist to this day.

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.