Mobile payments

It’s not a question of "if" mobile contactless and camera-based payments will become the norm – it’s a matter of "when," writes Julian Wallis, East Kilbride, U.K.-based sales director in the payments group at Rambus.

The digital era is changing a lot of habits, including dining. Mobile devices and other technologies now play a vital role in bringing patrons into coffee shops, fast food restaurants and sit-down establishments.

Giving away its speaker to Pixel devotees isn't just about getting these devices into homes; it's about getting them to the users most likely to favor Google over Amazon, writes Daniel Wolfe, Editor in Chief at PaymentsSource.

With AT&T dropping out of the program and Macy's focusing more on its own loyalty scheme, American Express is absorbing the first serious blows from key members in its multi-merchant Plenti Rewards Program.

Many bank-driven responses to fintech startups are "force fitting" traditional services, and don't fully meet new consumers' demands for social interaction, writes Ted Bissell, global director for digital consulting at Axis Corporate.

In service now for a decade in Africa, India and parts of Europe, M-Pesa is expanding its telco-driven mobile money service to include tap-and-go payments through wristbands, stickers or cards.

What makes Shake Shack's cashless store so potentially powerful — even if it's only one location in Manhattan — is what the burger chain can do when every customer is known to it.

Competition between card networks, tech titans Facebook and Google, Chinese fintech proxies Paytm and Hike, and M-Pesa will be fierce, and offer signs how other large emerging payments markets may evolve, writes Eric Grover, a principal at Intrepid Ventures.

The desperation in Puerto Rico for life's essentials — food, gas, water and electricity — in the wake of Hurricane Maria illustrates the need for payments providers to move as quickly as possible to get the U.S. territory in a position to reinstate some semblance of modern commerce.

Equifax's data breach may be the most serious, given that it covered 143 million consumers and involved reams of confidential information, but it wasn't the largest. Following are the biggest to date.

MobilePay, Danske’s digital-pay subsidiary, wants Nordic banks to offer a single payment platform to counter challengers like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

Amid a series of breaches, banks and payment services companies would be far better served by building solutions and programs that work toward instilling consumer confidence, instead of creating situations that continually erode trust, writes Madeline Aufseeser, CEO of Tender Armor.

Numerous data sources provide insight on the growth of this new paradigm in payments and some indication of how consumers can be motivated to prefer a specific payment instrument over others.

International sourcing is stressing businesses that are already too reliant on paper-based payment methods, argues Hyperwallet's Tomas Likar.

Until recently, many of the fraud prevention tactics employed by organizations have added to, not reduced, customer friction across the buying cycle, writes Michael Lynch, chief strategy officer at InAuth.

Diane Offereins manages relationships with 1,000 merchants and 3,300 financial institutions.

Alipay has entered agreements with Nordic trade and tourism institutions to further enable merchants in that region to accept payments from Chinese customers through Alipay's in-app marketing program.

SourceMedia's PayThink conference is an annual gathering of key decision-makers in the financial services and payments industries. This year's event, which took place in Phoenix this September, brought several key ideas to light.

The benefits of adopting an end-to-end payments solution are substantial and will help businesses collaborate with vendors and customers, while saving time and money, writes Stephen Markwell, head of treasury services product strategy for commercial banking at JPMorgan Chase.

As ISOs evaluate payment partners, it’s important that to dig into their existing tools and also gain an understanding of what the company’s continued investment is going to be for the future, writes O.B. Rawls IV, CEO and president of iPayment.