Mobile payments

UGO Mobile Solutions LP, a mobile-wallet smartphone app backed by two Canadian banks, has signed up 50,000 users since December as Apple Pay becomes available in countries outside of the U.S.

The swarm of new mobile payment initiatives has left traditional bank issuers with little choice but to shoehorn modern mobile wallets into their aging infrastructure.

Demonstrating that its contactless payments technology can serve other purposes, Powa Technologies will provide its PowaTag to Vodafone customers in the U.K. as a way to add minutes to their phone plans.

YellowPepper, a Latin American mobile payments firm, named the former president and founder of defunct near-field communication (NFC) firm ViVOTech as its board chair.

DigiSeq is aggressively pushing a future of wearable computing, contending that payments should be baked into whatever device the consumer is using, rather than a specific device an issuer directly distributes or chooses to perform financial services.

The mobile point of sale market already seems overcrowded, but what's out there now is just a taste of what's to come, according to 451 Research.

The concept of a purely mobile or digital transaction is already evolving into something more. A few companies are taking the idea of a software-based payment system and bringing it into the physical world.

Switzerland's Migros is the country's largest retailer and employer, as well as the owner of a prominent local bank, giving the company an unconventional perspective on the costs and benefits of mobile payments.

Particularly in the fast-food industry, the menu of mobile capabilities is more super-sized than ever — and it's one of the rare payments trends that's actually being driven by the consumer.

MasterCard will provide tokenization technology to the Samsung Pay mobile wallet when it launches in Europe.

Even though it is still the very early days of mobile payment wearables, consumer use of the devices is poised to reach a transaction volume at $501.1 billion by 2020.

MasterCard and Citibank India have launched what they claim is the first global digital wallet service in India.

Visa is partnering with and investing in Stripe, fueling the processing startup's international ambitions and product development while giving the card network added juice to build new technology.

The problem with basing a mobile point of sale system on Apple products is the merchant invariably pays Apple prices. E-Nabler aims to demonstrate that the same capabilities can be had on Android tablets and smartphones for at least half the price.

Starbucks and American Express are both using cross-merchant rewards to boost their own volume, but with a very different philosophy driving each company's program.

Person-to-person payments have been delivering huge improvements around the globe in areas where cash is difficult to use. But in countries where cash suffers little hardship—including the U.S., the U.K. and Canada—the P2P business case is very different.

Square Inc., the mobile-payments company founded and led by Jack Dorsey, the interim chief executive officer of Twitter Inc., filed confidentially for an initial public offering, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Protecting payment card data is a never-ending struggle, and the fraudsters are only getting more creative. So far this year several incidents and studies have demonstrated the evolving nature of cybercrime.

After almost three years in development, the retail industry's answer to Apple Pay is finally getting off the ground.

Loyalty programs are typically viewed as a consumer-facing marketing play, but the shift to mobile commerce is bringing these programs deeper into the supply chain.