Mobile payments

Fintechs that simply offer cosmetic upgrades to the cumbersome American banking system won't survive.

It's long been understood that transit systems are fertile ground for payment innovations.

Mobile order, delivery and payment apps are proliferating at restaurants, but they're also becoming less distinguishable, posing an entirely new challenge as deep discounts become the weapon of choice.

SumUp, a U.K.-based mobile point of sale company, needed a way to differentiate itself from larger rivals such as PayPal, Square and iZettle. Its solution is to offer faster settlement, in partnership with Starling Bank.

Starbucks’ latest innovation doesn’t include camera-driven invisible checkout and doesn’t even come from Seattle. But for rank and file retailers, it may prove even more informative than watching the progress of Amazon Go.

High-tech heavyweights like Google, Amazon and Apple have tied payments to broader financial services, added to the view that banks are less relevant, writes Polyient Labs' Brad Robertson.

The large payment processor mergers were meant to give bigger companies a better way to compete against the nimble startups that were luring their customers away for digital services such as mobile point of sale. And post-merger, Fiserv and First Data have fired their first salvo.

While Gen Z is just beginning to transition into adulthood there are some healthy indicators of how it is approaching credit as well as how it manages debt.

Mobile payments speed and convenience is more than an abstraction, and needs to be quantified, says UJET's Anand Janefalkar.

There's been a significant lag in how financial institutions serve commercial clients with mobile technology, and that creates an opportunity for credit unions.

The patent office is getting buried in applications for distributed ledger systems, a mountain of documents that chart a clear course toward making static identity and password protection irrelevant.

They’ve scrapped the newspapers and beefed up the food, but most Starbucks cafes in the U.S. don’t look all that different today than they did a decade ago. That’s about to change.

Seven European mobile payment firms have formed a cross-border transaction association covering an addressable market covering 25 million users and 350 banks.

Many in the payments industry insist that cash is becoming less important — but that doesn't mean it will ever go away.

As the U.K. rapidly transitions toward a cashless society — with U.K. Finance predicting that by 2028, just 9% of payments will be in cash — even pocket money is going digital. And the disappearance of tactile interaction with cash changes how kids learn about budgeting.

It took a few years for mobile wallets to get past the aura of just a "cool technology" looking for a problem to solve, but Google Pay and its peers are clearly finding their niche as a way to embed payments with customer engagement tools.

If the retail giants' Merchant Customer Exchange payments venture collapsed under the weight of trying to create a one-size-fits-all mobile wallet to bypass card networks, then the implosion of that joint venture was the best thing that could have happened.

In a world where not all gig workers can afford to be choosy, nor all companies agree to go against internal policy and pay early, innovation in pay advance products can provide a mutually beneficial solution, according to payments marketing consultant Gabriel Onyango.

Amid success stories like Apple Pay, Google Pay and the Starbucks app, there are many wallet apps that failed to gain traction — or squandered it when they did. But there is a lot to learn from their experiences.

In a double-teamed effort to showcase new technologies, Finnish telecom operator Telia demonstrated the use of 5G wireless service in an open-to-the-public face payments pilot with OP Bank.