Mobile payments

Criminals developing EventBot malware built it to take advantage of businesses and humans turning to mobile banking and payments in the current coronavirus crisis — but also to update itself on the fly to become more insidious in the future.

The agency will allow institutions providing 500 or fewer transfers a year to estimate costs in consumer disclosures rather than quote exact figures.

In announcing its plan to offer a deposit account and debit card in partnership with SoFi, the mobile phone maker suggested that the coronavirus pandemic will accelerate consumers’ adoption of contactless payments.

A former economist says high-ranking officials engaged in “legally risky” behavior to downplay consumer harm; online payments and contactless transactions jumped in the first quarter, and some think the new habits will stick.

The modern-day payment system was, over the last two decades, tailor-made for the shelter-in-place conditions many live and work under today.

Though NFC adoption is still somewhat patchwork in the U.S., new data suggests contactless payment transaction volume is rising during the coronavirus outbreak, giving an advantage to banks and merchants that enabled it early.

Former NetSpend CEO Dan Henry has been named as the CEO of Green Dot, the Pasadena, Calif.-based prepaid card issuer and banking company.

The coronavirus stimulus package has resurrected calls for the U.S. government to offer a central bank digital currency, public mobile wallets and postal banking—controversial ideas that are hard to pull off, but exist outside the U.S. and could dent interchange fees and private stablecoin projects like Facebook’s Libra.

Wells Fargo hopes to anchor its debit card at the top of customers’ digital wallets with a promotion offering users a $5 credit.

Banks, especially smaller ones, are more worried about the competitive inroads that Apple Pay, Venmo and others have made than they are about tech companies' incursions into other financial segments, according to a new survey by Promontory Interfinancial Network.