Mobile payments

Walmart Pay, the mega-retailer's mobile wallet, has gone live at its stores in Texas and Arkansas in anticipation of a national rollout.

More banks in Australia are lining up support for Android Pay, giving Google's contactless payment system some firmer footing in international markets.

WePay's bread and butter has been offering a streamlined e-payments hookup for online merchant platforms, and it's now adding in-person payments to keep businesses with offline needs from turning to the likes of Square.

Like any long-term relationship, Walmart and Visa have had their ups and downs. Sometimes these interactions were solely between the two companies; but many times, Walmart and Visa's conflicts gave a voice to the entire retail and payments industries.

If he's worried about fintech upstarts or bitcoin offering a high-tech alternative to Western Union's bread-and-butter business of money transfer, Chief Information Officer David Thompson doesn't let on.

As a supermarket chain with no supermarkets, FreshDirect has always been an early mover by design. That made Samsung's Internet-connected refrigerator a natural fit.

Walt Disney Co., having found success with its wearable MagicBand payment system, is retiring the paper "Disney Dollars" it has long accepted from parkgoers.

Citigroup is testing Bluetooth beacon technology in a pilot that gives customers cardless access to branch ATMs after business hours, among other services.

Apple Pay's slow expansion around the world seems to have gotten a jolt with the announcement of multiple Canadian issuers signing on, but it still faces many of the same roadblocks that have plagued adoption elsewhere.

The 'app economy' is getting larger by the year, and a team of entrepreneurs firmly rooted in the payments establishment sees big trouble ahead when it comes to facilitating transactions.