Mobile payments

From its beginnings as a standalone Starbucks Card app, the Starbucks mobile experience was always a bit different from what other companies tried to do.

AWS's recent tech summit, with strobe lights and throbbing sound system may have felt more like a music festival than a conference, but one thing was clear: the symbiotic relationship between the online juggernaut and financial services runs deep.

The person-to-person network also saw $28 billion in payments in the quarter and it added more bank members.

Dunkin’ Brands, parent company of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, is extending its deal with mobile app maker CardFree to increase its efforts to close the mobile coffee-sales gap with its rival, Starbucks.

Though it’s still early in the development of voice assistant technology, researchers are getting a sense of who’s most likely to use voice commands for shopping and payments.

Grubhub's deal to purchase of LevelUp, announced alongside its second-quarter earnings, is a deal that seems to make more sense for LevelUp — expanding its offerings to include delivery — than it does for the buyer.

The news that Snap Inc. is shutting down Snapcash, a version of Square Cash offered on its Snapchat social media platform, may have less to do with P2P payments and more to do with the long-term future of the company itself.

Mastercard and Worldpay are embarking on a strong push to promote Mastercard's Pay by Bank system, which will likely face a deluge of competition under the updated Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which took effect this year.

Digital payments are becoming a critical aspect of nearly every new service for merchants or financial institutions.

Starbucks achieved rapid adoption of its mobile card app by building it on top of the highly successful Starbucks closed-loop gift card. Such a model could also apply to the cannabis market, which is largely shunned by mainstream banks and card networks.