Disruptors

Payments played a major role in the 2014 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Here are some of the biggest announcements that came out during the conference, and a few from just before or afterwards that were no less important to the mobile payments community.

Cellum, a mobile commerce provider, has integrated MasterCard's MasterPass digital wallet with its own mobile wallet offering, OTPay, making it the first third-party in Europe to integrate MasterPass.

Building simplified digital experiences, especially in financial services, is critical to institutional survival.

Some governments are getting into the digital currency game, offering their own alternatives to cash with traits that differ in meaningful ways from cross-border cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

PayPal's history suggests that the problem of Bitcoin fraud will only get worse as the electronic currency gains momentum.

After every major Samsung product unveiling this week, PayPal was quick to say: we have an app for that.

There is a sudden surge of attention around Host Card Emulation, a technology that enables Near Field Communication contactless payments without requiring access to the phone's secure element (a chip that carriers control). Several mobile wallets are either in testing or fully live with the technology.

Until recently, mobile wallets could count on getting at least some boost from exclusivity. If you were on Sprint, you could use Google Wallet but not Isis. If you were on AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile, you could use Isis but not Google Wallet. If you had an iPhone, you could use neither, but you had your pick of software-based mobile wallets such as LevelUp and the Starbucks card.

Silicon Valley Bank and MasterCard Inc. launched the Commerce.Innovated. accelerator to find and nurture innovators in payments technology.

Capital One has joined clearXchange, providing a flood of new potential end users to the bank-led person-to-person payments initiative.

The Merchant Customer Exchange's mobile wallet is still taking form. The retailer-driven initiative hasn't even given its product a name in the year and a half it's been in development, but a steady stream of news about its technology and partnerships show what the fully assembled product might look like.

The Bitcoin community is in limbo after two big exchanges halted withdrawals due to a technical feature within the Bitcoin protocol that allowed fraudsters to manipulate transaction IDs.

Whole Foods Market has agreed to use multiple versions of Square Inc.'s mobile payments technology.

Payment cards can sometimes do more than just make purchases. Some pack in odd functions; others are high-tech takes on the aging magnetic-stripe card.

Five years ago, Starbucks was primarily a coffee company. Today, it's a pioneer in mobile payments technology with a significant portion of its U.S. transactions made using its smartphone app. And according to the company's CEO, this is only the beginning.

Benjamin Lawsky, New York's top financial regulator, rarely sounds ambivalent. But when the topic is something as unprecedented and complex as Bitcoin, the big questions appear to give him pause.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is changing his responsibilities to place a greater emphasis on mobile payments and other digital initiatives.

Mobile carriers are becoming more heavily involved in the payments world. Many are spearheading tests and full deployments of mobile wallets throughout the world, and some like T-Mobile are launching prepaid cards as well.

Nearly 10 million Starbucks customers use its mobile app to make payments, totaling close to 5 million mobile payments a week, the company reports.

T-Mobile's bid to provide basic checking services to its mobile phone customers is the latest signal that banks are losing the low end of the consumer market.