Mobile payments

Varo Money, an app designed for people who want to bank exclusively on their cellphones, announced Tuesday that it has filed formal applications for a national bank charter.

As ATMs on large bank networks increasingly use mobile phones for account access — a trend driven in part by mobile banking — non-bank ATM operators are working to enable the same features to attract mobile-savvy cash users.

Visa’s efforts to expand its mobile payments service mVisa in developing nations reached a milestone this month in Nigeria, the first country where banks are enabling cross-border payments with the QR code-based mVisa technology.

Mobile wallets have failed to excite many consumers, but Canada has an extreme case of paralysis underscoring the stark need for ongoing incentives to get consumers to change their payment habits.

The payments industry has come a long way with how it treats loyalty and rewards. Here are some of the more creative offerings to come about this year.

Citigroup is expanding its payments partnership to allow its card members to use their ThankYou rewards points for purchases at PayPal checkout in the U.S.

Turning a pre-existing digital payment network into an in-store line buster has been a key play for Starbucks and Square, and Amazon is weighing in with its own app that allows its huge network of users to streamline retail experiences.

Mass transit systems have been proven as an effective way of introducing new technologies and driving adoption in many regions, but in many ways they are still vastly behind schedule.

The white-label banking platform provider Urban FT has purchased the mobile banking technology firm iParse and several of its patents.

The feature instructs consumers to follow an object on the screen with their eyes, in a randomized pattern Jumio said will be nearly impossible for fraudsters to fake.

As retailers scratch their heads to find ways to counter Amazon's ongoing disruption of their industry, investment is flowing to technology companies that meld shopping, payments and fulfillment.

The concept of digital payments doesn't often cross paths with the concept of robots moving autonomously through our world. But in a few cases, robots have been created to handle payments and deliver goods.

As the number of apps for banking and payments increases, so does the reliability risk.

Removing restrictions on companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon could have clear repercussions for the payments industry.

Millennials -- a demographic credit unions badly want to capture -- are using P-to-P services to pay for drugs and gambling, and while CUs may not want their members paying for illegal activities with account-connected services, a growing number of institutions also want to be the FI of choice for legal drug businesses.

Visa’s core mission is to crush cash, but its latest promotion rewarding businesses with a pile of money if they stop accepting cash altogether may be too little for this goal.

Trump’s nominee for head of bank supervision at the Fed may tackle Volcker Rule revision; rising home prices and improved job market give borrowers more options as lines of credit reset.

Mobile and online P-to-P services may be the popular, mainstream payments service of choice for young people who don't prefer cash, but it also has a seedy underbelly, according to new survey data.

Advanced operating systems can run marketing and support services such as Apple Pay. Merchants would be well served to consider the diverse options of new terminals, writes Ben Wagner, director of solutions at Ingenico Group, North America.

Some merchants, issuers and processors are concerned that the card brands will tout their "ownership" of payment card prefixes as a basis for requesting that mobile transactions on their cards be routed to their networks and screened through tokenization services they provide.