Mobile payments

Burger King envisions a future in which the only thing its patrons will touch is their actual food, a redesign acknowledging 2020’s emergency workarounds have permanently shifted how people engage businesses and gained habits that go beyond their fear of spreading germs.

COVID-19 has accelerated changes in payments behavior that would otherwise have taken years to occur, laying the foundation for global expansion post-pandemic. But for different parts of the world, this digital transformation had very different outcomes.

Mercari Inc. wants to become the top provider of mobile payments in Japan even as its biggest rivals join forces, but that ambition is second to making the business profitable.

The humble QR code — invented for automobile manufacturing in 1994 — had been on the rise as a payment method for many years, but the pandemic expanded its use in the U.S. in some unforeseen ways.

Ant Group was dealt another blow by more regulations to contain risks in the country’s burgeoning online lending industry as Jack Ma’s financial technology giant prepares for its initial public offering.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced retailers and consumers alike to consider the benefits of shopping via a mobile app, providers of shopping and loyalty apps were seeking partnerships with security vendors to deploy fraud prevention technology.

Apple's legal dispute with Epic Games, the publisher of Fortnite, has exposed a potential nuclear option that the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant can use against any company that sells online.

Besides providing a safe, sanitary no-touch payment option for consumers, there are other advantages to contactless payments, such as line-busting, says Todd Barstow, vice president of payment solutions for GK Software USA.

Many of the changes on the horizon were inevitable, but the pandemic has accelerated the shift to digital payments and finance, forcing banks to reevaluate their models and pivot toward faster technology adoption.

The fintech and the Minnesota bank it acquired last week, renamed Mid-Central National Bank, intend to pioneer a new method of storing and moving money for consumers.