Mobile payments

Mobile wallets are typically designed to be most useful at the point of sale. Israeli location-based technology vendor WiseSec sees an opportunity to extend a mobile app's utility throughout the store by using beacons that can sense how far away a shopper is.

Mobile payments provider Spindle will provide aggregation technology to EggZack to resell to mobile point of sale and e-commerce merchants.

There have been many attempts in recent years to convince issuers and consumers to store multiple payment accounts in a single high-tech card, typically with an emphasis on consumer choice. A new approach uses the same technology but packs in data analytics to take some of that choice out of consumers' hands.

Deployments of biometrics are usually fairly challenging, but Apple has demonstrated through its Touch ID fingerprint system that it can scale a consumer biometric technology quickly. London-based ValidSoft predicts it can do the same for voice biometrics by using the microphone built into most consumer gadgets.

Efforts to apply biometric security to payments have reached the fraud-prone remittance market, as Touch ID takes hold for both incumbents such as Western Union and upstarts such as Xoom.

In a term often reserved for interior design, women's fashions or ballroom dancing, Apple Pay users call the mobile pay system "elegant" because of how easy it is to use.

The rapid pace of mobile point of sale technology and advanced merchant services is pressuring traditional terminal makers to ensure that their devices are not only still relevant, but capable of evolution.

As Starbucks has proven for years, few retail interactions are more tailor-made for mobile payment than coffee sales. But when U.K.-based grocery chain Marks & Spencer launched its own coffee loyalty app in a 58-store trial in London, it chose to keep its menu much simpler.

By linking mobile payments with money transfers, Western Union created a new use for Apple's mobile wallet. But it must still rigidly conform to the basic requirements of an Apple Pay transaction — without a bank account, there is no payment.

Apple's mobile wallet has been out for just four months, and already it has shaken up the way mobile payments operate at the point of sale. It has faced pushback from some merchants and banks, but it has also popularized new forms of security and other payment technology.

While Visa and MasterCard aren't yet applying the same level of pressure for tokenization security as they are for EMV-chip cards, the card networks' CEOs are clear that this technology is their new expectation for e-commerce.

Several wallet apps already let restaurant patrons order ahead for takeout and/or pay without waiting for a waiter. A Ukrainian company called Settle takes this concept a step further by also allowing customers to skip the wait for a table.

Google reports a dramatic increase in mobile shopping, suggesting the channel is now mainstream for consumers.

The telco-backed mobile wallet Softcard is at a significant crossroads. Though it once saw the debut of Apple Pay as an opportunity, Apple may actually be edging its rivals out of the market, and Softcard's next move will decide not only its own fate but also the strategies of the banks and merchants that could benefit from its technology.

The introduction of Apple Pay has also thrust Near Field Communication-based contactless payment technology out of the wings and into the spotlight.

Apple Pay's Touch ID is the exception, not the rule. Biometric security typically requires some type of add-on hardware, a model that has struggled to get much adoption over the years.

Among the many obstacles for mobile payments, the most daunting is getting shoppers to change behavior. The fact is that plastic cards have worked quite well for a very long time and consumers are quite used to them. To get consumers to change decades-old habits is far from easy.

Apple Pay has secured a dominant position at the point of sale, with two thirds of all U.S. contactless payment volume coming through Apple's new mobile wallet, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. But this may not be the boost to mobile payments that many experts have long predicted.

Mobile payment and commerce provider Mozido LLC is bringing on a former MasterCard executive as its president for global markets.

Western Union is adopting a vastly different use of Apple Pay than what banks and merchants have so far considered.