Mobile payments

The voice-activated payment option through Assistant has been added to Google Pay's features to address situations in which consumers have to pay someone back, for example, after a weekend activity.

Samsung Pay became available Thursday, allowing users to load UniCredit credit cards, MyPay and MyOne prepaid and debit cards for payment directly from the Samsung Pay app.

With 1.3 billion people who are mostly unbanked in an economy where 85% to 95% of all transactions are still conducted in cash, few other markets have such an opportunity to modernize payments.

The speed at which money transfer payments are evolving from legacy, paper-based systems to digital platforms couldn’t be more stark at Western Union, where Sheri Rhodes has just been named executive vice president and chief technology officer.

The main problem is that Amazon's Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant can’t yet verify a person’s identity. But there are already workarounds for that issue — and the tech giants may solve it soon.

BBVA has started testing a facial recognition payment application for employees to use at cafeterias and restaurants at the Ciudad BBVA office and business conference complex in Madrid.

Affirm Inc., a startup from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, is going after millennials with a new kind of credit card alternative that only exists online.

Assuming that a wireless protocol is to be deployed for ease of use, the key decision to be made is the transport for communication between In-vehicle infotainment system (IVI) system and pump, writes Jim Carroll, chief technology officer at Mobica.

There are signs that the wearable payments market is starting to come into focus. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it's destined for success.

While building consumer trust in these new payments methods will undoubtedly take time, the possibility of freeing consumers from physical payment objects — cash, cards, phones — would be transformative, writes Beatta McInerney, business development manager for payments at ScanSource.