Mobile payments

When Walmart switched on Walmart Pay this week at 600 stores in two states, it marked the beginning of a new era, when merchants finally take the reins in mobile payments — and, by extension, the future of digital commerce.

The Merchant Customer Exchange, a retailer-backed mobile wallet venture of over three years in the works, has postponed its plans for a national rollout of its mobile wallet.

Walmart Pay, the mega-retailer's mobile wallet, has gone live at its stores in Texas and Arkansas in anticipation of a national rollout.

More banks in Australia are lining up support for Android Pay, giving Google's contactless payment system some firmer footing in international markets.

WePay's bread and butter has been offering a streamlined e-payments hookup for online merchant platforms, and it's now adding in-person payments to keep businesses with offline needs from turning to the likes of Square.

Like any long-term relationship, Walmart and Visa have had their ups and downs. Sometimes these interactions were solely between the two companies; but many times, Walmart and Visa's conflicts gave a voice to the entire retail and payments industries.

If he's worried about fintech upstarts or bitcoin offering a high-tech alternative to Western Union's bread-and-butter business of money transfer, Chief Information Officer David Thompson doesn't let on.

As a supermarket chain with no supermarkets, FreshDirect has always been an early mover by design. That made Samsung's Internet-connected refrigerator a natural fit.

Walt Disney Co., having found success with its wearable MagicBand payment system, is retiring the paper "Disney Dollars" it has long accepted from parkgoers.

Citigroup is testing Bluetooth beacon technology in a pilot that gives customers cardless access to branch ATMs after business hours, among other services.

Apple Pay's slow expansion around the world seems to have gotten a jolt with the announcement of multiple Canadian issuers signing on, but it still faces many of the same roadblocks that have plagued adoption elsewhere.

The 'app economy' is getting larger by the year, and a team of entrepreneurs firmly rooted in the payments establishment sees big trouble ahead when it comes to facilitating transactions.

Corporate payments services company Bottomline Technologies has introduced a mobile solution that would allow U.K businesses to pay customers quickly and directly.

Carrier billing provider Bango has purchased BilltoMobile and its contracts from Danal Inc., making Bango a processor of carrier billing transactions across all major mobile networks in the U.S.

MasterCard is taking an obscure domestic mobile service global, with the hope of jump-starting innovations that would otherwise be locked to a specific region of the world.

Square's practice of using its merchant transaction data for risk analysis may seem innovative, but other other agile specialists—including Intuit—are finding ways to use new data streams to limit risk and deliver funds to borrowers.

Mobile wallets may not have eliminated cash and cards, but they are becoming almost unavoidable in many retail settings. However, there are still a few areas where mobile technology is slow to arrive.

Though many have tried and failed to get bitcoin into the mainstream, iPayYou CEO Gene Kavner is ready to take a page out of the playbook of Amazon.com, his former employer, to bring attention to his new bitcoin wallet.

Department store chain Kohl’s has stitched together two of the most frustrating elements of checking out: adding loyalty points at the same time the payment goes through.

Uber riders that prefer to pay with Google Wallet will have to switch to Android Pay on May 9, according to emails reportedly sent out to Google Wallet users.