Mobile payments

Do the Black Friday and Cyber Monday retail holidays still have meaning in a world where sales promotions are perennial and e-commerce is embedded in nearly every form of digital communication? According to data, they do, and more now than ever.

PayPal is following its investment in micro-investing app with a direct link, vastly expanding the app's addressable market.

Successful mobile payment players such as Starbucks, Alipay and WeChat Pay all rely on optical scanning technology rather than NFC to execute payments. It's time the rest of the industry take note, writes Maikki Frisk, executive director of the Mobey Forum.

Visa is digging deep into the question of whether transit fare payments can influence habits in other settings.

With a solution that addresses the unique security, transaction speed and integration requirements of the transit environment, EMV contactless open payments for transit can become a reality and change our public transportation experiences for the better, writes Randy Vanderhoof, director of the U.S. Payments Forum.

As the banking industry moves closer to adopting a faster payments system, bank executives have begun to think through the impact it will have on clients and banks themselves.

Merchants’ fates are inextricably linked to what customers want. So, as they continue to embrace frictionless experiences, merchants are under mounting pressure to deliver or risk losing out, writes Joseph Daly, COO of North American Payment Processing for Paysafe.

U.K. startup Flux has signed up a few banks for its platform that delivers real-time receipts to mobile banking apps. The problem is that few retailers are interested, and experts say that’s not likely to change any time soon.

It may seem odd at first that Square is using the Cash app as a testbed for bitcoin, but if Square Cash is ever to distinguish itself from the bigger options in P-to-p, it needs to take risks that Square can't afford with its primary customer base.

One of the risks of omnichannel shopping is showrooming, where consumers browse products in person at a store but purchase online from a rival at a better price. This problem has existed for years in the brick-and-mortar world, and the maturation of digital shopping has caused showrooming to spread to more retailers.