Mobile payments

Alibaba is investing billions into mobile ordering technology in China — but what is more fundamentally American than spending large amounts of money on food?

Despite more bank and investor activity around digital P2P payments, consumer usage of P2P is a mixed bag.

With smaller screen sizes and increased levels of distractions ranging from a text or a notification, pitfalls in the checkout process can result in more abandoned carts than successful transactions, writes Andre Lyver, director of engineering for financial services at Shopify.

Microchip implants could be considered the ultimate form of mobile payment — skipping the smartphone altogether in favor of giving people bionic abilities. And a small segment of the population is already lining up to try it out.

Digital money transfer provider SimbaPay has added an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot that will enable banks and other companies to offer international money transfer to customers across Africa and Europe through text messaging.

As the agency pulls back its enforcement efforts, it opens the door for state authorities to pursue more cases against financial startups for their data collection and privacy practices.

By aligning, the two companies hope to offer efficiencies in a fiercely competitive business payments market.

PSD2's open banking wave is attracting lots of attention from payments technology firms, and Zafin is making moves to cement its place in the market.

The problem is that, like usernames and passwords, biometrics are a static form of identity that can be exploited rather than a dynamic method that's of little use to crooks if stolen.

Extending this functionality into corporate cards has the potential to make the commercial payments process more seamless and secure, writes Russell Bennett, chief technology officer at Fraedom.