Mobile payments

Square is seeking a buyer, according to multiple reports, but the company's official statement indicates otherwise.

Biometric technology could eliminate the need to carry a payment card or even a smartphone by allowing users to authorize payments with a fingerprint, handprint, face or retina scan. But the technology has had a rocky past, and each new product comes with new quirks.

Payment technology provider Merchant Warehouse has agreed to market services from the hospitality mobile payments vendor TabbedOut.

SCVNGR's LevelUp is reducing its mobile wallet's transaction fee from 2% to 1.95% in its continued attempt to shave interchange costs.

Winning in the mobile world means driving revenues, acquiring new customers, and accelerating transactions. Mobile capture apps need open platforms and frameworks for apps that can be optimized for multiple uses and customized for their organization’s documents, customers, user experience and requirements.

Ten years from now, members of the acquiring industry may have fond recollections of the nation's transition to mobile payments, says Brian Mooney, CEO of Bank of America Merchant Services.

Santander's Polish subsidiary is linking its mobile banking app to a merchant marketplace where purchases of deliveries, flowers and transit fare can be funded directly from the user's bank account.

Mobile wallets and mobile point of sale systems have tried many tactics to win over merchants by cutting costs. Some vendors have been extremely inventive in how they push cheaper payment options.

After years of speculation, Apple Inc. may finally launch a contactless mobile payments system with its rumored smartwatch.

The future belongs to mobile payments, but that future remains unclear, as many competing technologies are vying for consumers' attention.

Smartwatches may not be popular enough or have enough screen real estate to usurp smartphones as the next major mobile payment device, but there is a strong potential for the two technologies to work in tandem.

This year roughly $507 billion in payments around the globe will be made through mobile devices, up 40% compared to 2013, according to Juniper Research.

VeriFone Systems plans to offer a new portable card terminal that can accept EMV-chip card payments and uses several wireless technologies.

Roam, Ingenico's mobile point of sale subsidiary, has partnered with services provider EVO Payments International to market Roam's technology to U.S. merchants.

Powa is launching a bundled mobile point of sale offering, called PowaPOS, which U.S. merchants can use to accept EMV-chip cards.

CardFlight, a mobile payments hardware and software developer, has introduced a mobile point of sale device with an emphasis on branding.

The merchants who want to use Leaf's tablet for payments, called LeafPresenter, often also need transaction services. Through the launch of its online marketplace, Leaf will now be ready to offer information from a host of merchant acquirers.

Walmart has long been as much a force in financial services as it has been in retail. Here are some of ways Walmart and its executives have shaped - and challenged - the payments industry.

Peter Hazlehurst, Google Wallet's director of product management, has quit Google, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

SCVNGR's LevelUp has begun a campaign to urge users of its mobile wallet to fund payments from a debit card instead of a credit card. The end goal is to get its transaction fees as low as possible, while filling a void left by merchants who switched away from another pricing model it boldly called Interchange Zero.