Mobile payments

Mobile banking technology company Monitise is by all appearances for sale, though it may have to get creative to find a buyer.

Mobile payment company iZettle is countering the idea that EMV compliance increases merchant expense by offering a free version of its mobile chip-and-PIN card reader.

A joint venture formed by Norway's three dominant mobile phone carriers is testing a new, rebranded version of its mobile wallet, designed to lower the barriers merchants and consumers face when first using a mobile phone for payments.

Apple isn't the only device maker with its own mobile wallet. Though Samsung hasn't launched anything like Apple Pay, every year Samsung has added new technology to its smartphones and wearables to piece together the elements of a true mobile wallet.

Starbucks' decision to support Apple Pay within the coffee chain's mobile payment app seems like a natural alliance of two major forces in mobile payments, but it raises a significant question: Why not do the same with Square, with which Starbucks has much deeper ties?

Apple is well known for its "reality distortion field," a term applied to products that seem to appeal more because of Apple's aura of coolness than for the actual features of the product. But Apple Pay is not a case of Apple suddenly making mobile payments cool — consumers were already on board with the technology, even if they didn't know what to call it.

The Australian market has used EMV-chip cards for more than a decade, necessitating a very different approach to the mobile point of sale.

American Express will certainly suffer when its 16-year cobranding deal with Costco ends in 2016, but its executives will spend the next year building up the card brand's digital payment products to create enough opportunities to ease the company's short-term pain and guarantee its long-term health.

PayPal and Apple are well positioned as the mobile wallet race shifts from pure payments to broader services such as marketing and aggregation, according to Forrester Research.

Mobile banking apps that allow consumers to proactively lock their debit cards, or limit their cards' use to specific scenarios, could shift the way banks manage fraud and even enable them to place some of the liability on the consumer.

Google employees are testing a service that lets them make payments by speaking their initials to the cashier, according to an article in The Information.

Sionic Mobile, an Atlanta-based mobile commerce company, released its Shop2Give app to the public today. The new app is designed to enable nonprofits to raise funds through consumers' mobile payment activity.

JetBlue Airways will become the first domestic carrier to accept Apple Pay.

Wirecard, a German digital payments company, is introducing a software development kit to provide payment capabilities via wearable devices.

Samsung is widely reported to be adding mobile-payment technology from LoopPay to its next Galaxy smartphone. Such an approach would be vastly different from that of Apple, PayPal or MCX's CurrentC — and it would address a key issue with LoopPay's own business model.

The flood of mobile-centric point of sale (POS) offering provides many options for retailers, but there's still a long road ahead to adoption on the consumer side.

Amazon.com is a savvy and influential company in the e-commerce world, but its efforts in payments have been less consistent. It has significantly changed the way people redeem rewards and shop on third-party sites, but it has proven less successful in person-to-person payments and the mobile point of sale.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is pushing hard against charging fees for faster Internet access, a stance that's a relief to businesses like Dwolla that use the Internet to develop and deliver payment services.

CardFlight has updated its SwipeSimple mobile point of sale device, which allows merchants to take payments and manage their business from smartphones and tablets.

Discover, the only major U.S. card brand not connected to Apple Pay, is thus one of the few major credit card issuers not shoehorning Apple into its ads. But Discover has never been one to ignore a marketing opportunity.