Mobile payments

NXT-ID and vacation and entertainment club memberships retailer WorldVentures have formed a strategic alliance.

Person-to-person payments are a sudden hotbed of innovation. Many banks and technology companies are rethinking their approach to P2P and finding ways to offer the service in a way that is genuinely appealing to the mobile generation.

The research says it over and over: Banks should move quickly to adopt or develop new payments technology, but it leaves banks with a very long 'to do' list.

Mobile technology companies love baking purchase capabilities into websites and mobile apps, providing myriad choices that make securing merchant buy-in the next big play. But there is a question of whether the rapid growth of in-app purchase may be "too much."

Technology and applications platform Envestnet | Yodlee has partnered with white-label app provider Magpie on a full-service platform.

With emerging payments technology, it's important for legacy companies cover as many bases as possible. For MasterCard, this means putting its technology into everything from jewelry to home appliances to a reimagined take on the classic plastic payment card.

New patents provide a glimpse into how Apple Inc. plans to personalize the payments experience by harnessing Apple’s iMessage channel, bringing it in line with message-based P2P services from Venmo, Facebook, Google and others.

MasterCard is unveiling an app that takes the Internet of Things to its logical extreme, stopping only one step short of becoming Star Trek's instant food replicator.

Transportation is one of the most obvious venues for mobile transactions, though it can also be one of the most difficult, given the legacy infrastructure and the vast scale of most systems.

Payments technology provider Elavon says it is among the first payment processing companies to offer Apple Pay to Canadian businesses.