Mobile payments

It's long been understood that transit systems are fertile ground for payment innovations.

Mobile order, delivery and payment apps are proliferating at restaurants, but they're also becoming less distinguishable, posing an entirely new challenge as deep discounts become the weapon of choice.

SumUp, a U.K.-based mobile point of sale company, needed a way to differentiate itself from larger rivals such as PayPal, Square and iZettle. Its solution is to offer faster settlement, in partnership with Starling Bank.

Starbucks’ latest innovation doesn’t include camera-driven invisible checkout and doesn’t even come from Seattle. But for rank and file retailers, it may prove even more informative than watching the progress of Amazon Go.

High-tech heavyweights like Google, Amazon and Apple have tied payments to broader financial services, added to the view that banks are less relevant, writes Polyient Labs' Brad Robertson.

The large payment processor mergers were meant to give bigger companies a better way to compete against the nimble startups that were luring their customers away for digital services such as mobile point of sale. And post-merger, Fiserv and First Data have fired their first salvo.

While Gen Z is just beginning to transition into adulthood there are some healthy indicators of how it is approaching credit as well as how it manages debt.

Mobile payments speed and convenience is more than an abstraction, and needs to be quantified, says UJET's Anand Janefalkar.

There's been a significant lag in how financial institutions serve commercial clients with mobile technology, and that creates an opportunity for credit unions.

The patent office is getting buried in applications for distributed ledger systems, a mountain of documents that chart a clear course toward making static identity and password protection irrelevant.