Mobile payments

A year from now, Sionic Mobile will have distributed 100,000 free iBeacons to small businesses, a $1 million marketing play the company hopes secures its place among local stores as they start to adopt mobile technologies.

Now that Verizon has nailed down a deal to buy Yahoo's search and advertising business, it's starting to look a lot more like Google — and it might even have the tools to take a second stab at the payments industry.

For retailers at least, the most important screens are now the small ones.

The notion that if you build it, they will come clearly doesn’t work with mobile payments, and Apple Inc. is ready to try another approach.

Patrons of the GC Express gas station in Caro, Mich., have another choice to make at the pump: Do they want to pay with a credit union's mobile banking app?

To hear PayPal CEO Dan Schulman tell it, his company's agreement with Visa this week is a transformative and history-making deal. But in at least one way, PayPal must make sure that history does not repeat itself.

Visa and Mastercard both face the prospect of becoming "dumb pipes" as other companies innovate on top of their networks. To combat this trend, both are taking steps to be major players in the digital economy.

They say to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and First Data's Clover operation did just that.

Visa and PayPal have been at war for as long as PayPal has existed, and their recent cease fire could allow both companies to overcome the barriers they have spent years building between the worlds of digital and in-store payments.

Mastercard is betting its $920 million investment in the U.K.'s VocaLink gives it a significant edge in many emerging technologies, particularly in regions where it is lagging Visa in traditional card-based business lines.

HSBC is adding Samsung Pay support in the U.S., given the bank's customers access to all three of the major device operator-driven mobile payment systems.

More big banks are committing to their digital wallet strategies, creating the opportunity to extend their brands into new realms as payments and shopping go mobile under their own brands—but there are some notable holdouts.

The company poised to push the boundaries of mobile computing is ARM Holdings Plc, which has built a business designing chips that squeeze the most out of limited battery capacity on mobile devices, dominating 85 percent of the market.

Verifone Inc. still faces challenges in certain aspects of its business, but the terminal manufacturer is learning with experience how to fit into the fast-changing world of omnichannel technology.

Frontier's old school way of processing in-flight payments sounds like a classic luggage nightmare—the passenger arrives at the destination days beforehand, if not longer.

Despite improvements in technology, most consumers remain skeptical of mobile wallets, often testing them once or twice before abandoning the idea and returning to traditional payment methods.

Inside nearly every smartphone, tablet, e-reader and smartwatch are tiny microprocessors that tell the machine what to do. Small pulses of energy move from a gadget’s battery through millions of tiny transistors, triggering commands and responses in nanoseconds, be it playing games, posting to Facebook, sending texts, or taking pictures.

Even though Olympics sponsor Visa may have the biggest mobile payments presence at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games in Brazil in two weeks, Samsung Electronics plans to attend the games as well by launching its mobile wallet in the country at a time when hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected.

The payment-enabled fingernails project -- and the surrounding media attention -- demonstrates that wearable payments have become more than just experimental.

An NFC-based mobile wallet and the bold creation of Canada’s largest wireless carriers, suretap looked promising at first. But in the end, it couldn't keep up with juggernauts like Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay.