Mobile payments

MCX, a retailer-driven mobile commerce initiative, is being steadily built upon retailers' desire to control their own customer data and possibly lessen the sting of, or bypass totally, card payment interchange fees. But it must still deliver two key things: a brand and a product.

MagicBand, a system that Walt Disney Co. has been testing all year with a limited number of employees and Walt Disney World resort patrons, seems to be poised for success based on what looks like an extreme level of commitment to it — so far.

Atlanta, Ga.-based Cardlytics Inc. plans to support location-based card-linked marketing with push notifications in the first quarter of 2014.

By adding Popmoney person-to-person payments to its primary mobile banking application, PNC Bank is putting the feature where its most tech-savvy customers expect to see it.

Fiserv will expand Instant Payments to the mobile version of its Popmoney person-to-person payment system in November.

MasterCard is placing more emphasis on things like airline boarding, wearable computing and many other things the card network contends can be used to win a consumer's business long before the payment is made.

Versafe doesn't trust consumers to take the necessary precautions to protect their devices. So the company built a fraud protection layer within its banking application to take matters out of users' hands.

Core Innovation Capital, the investment partner of the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), has made an investment in Wipit Inc., a mobile payments company focused on unbanked consumers.

DoubleBeam is using electronic checks in its mobile payment system to cut merchants' costs on interchange.

Bank technology vendor Yodlee has a new mobile and Web app called Tandem that allows consumers to manage their personal relationships and the financial obligations that go along with those relationships.

The Societe de transport de Montreal (STM) is testing a loyalty program that ties user preferences and special offers to transit payment cards, a move that's also designed to shift rider volume from peak times.

MasterCard Inc. and a major wireless carrier in the Netherlands will join three Dutch banks in reviving a Near Field Communication-based mobile payment test that was nearly three years in the making.

PayWith's digital wallet can allow any merchant that accepts MasterCard to also accept mobile payments without buying new hardware.

Many mobile commerce systems are built on the premise that we need something simpler than typing a complex password on a small screen. With the iPhone 5S, Apple unveiled its own solution: a fingerprint scanner.

The digital payments initiative clearXchange is run by three banks that make up more than 50% of the online banking market in the U.S., but it still has a lot of work cut out for it.

Today's the day Apple unveils the successor to the iPhone 5. Here's a look at the leaks, patent applications and other rumors that shed light on the company's mobile payment plans.

Paydiant, a cloud-based mobile wallet provider, announced a $15 million Series C round of funding led by one of its customers to speed up product development, marketing and sales.

PayPal has unveiled PayPal Beacon, a plug-in device for merchants that will detect when shoppers running PayPal's mobile app enter a store.

ZooZ, a provider of mobile payments technology is launching a checkout system based on HTML5, the latest version of the HTML markup language used in desktop and mobile websites.

Since its founding six years ago, Braintree has grown its annual processing volume to $10 billion a year — including more than $2 billion from mobile transactions — which could make the Chicago-based payments processor an attractive addition to a number of companies.