Mobile payments

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.