Loyalty and rewards

The additions are part of Samsung's strategy to turn Samsung Pay into a broader commerce platform.

Bluetooth beacons — small transmitters that retailers can use to broadcast offers to shoppers' mobile phones — have always lived at the periphery of the payments world. But that may be changing very soon.

JPMorgan is continuing its push to snag wealthier credit-card users and gain market share.

Rewards are considered a key driver to get consumers to adopt mobile payments, and Walgreens has tied its loyalty program to Android Pay.

At most merchants, mobile wallets have been a solution in search of a problem. But at the pharmacy, every customer already has a problem — possibly several problems — they want to address before they even think about how they want to pay.

Two years after eschewing Apple Pay and NFC, CVS is integrating payments, marketing and prescription ordering in a single bar code-enabled mobile app, replacing a customer experience that currently relies heavily on time-consuming interactions with staff.

The loyalty key fobs that reside alongside car and house keys on a chain is rarely discussed in the plastic card market, but has nonetheless undergone a revolution in recent years. Certainly in the U.K., their popularity has soared.

At its launch in 2004, ThankYou had its own separate identity, customer base and website from the rest of Citi – even logging into the program was difficult.

The hit smartphone game Pokemon Go is not a mobile wallet or a loyalty app, but it is arguably far more successful at driving traffic to retailers' stores than many of the apps designed for that purpose.

Subway is reimagining how ordering, payments and marketing tie together at its sandwich shops. It's in the process of launching a new division called Subway Digital, which will pool the expertise of specialists in technology, marketing and operations rather than give full rein to any one of those disciplines.