Mobile payments

Microsoft is the latest to try to help a big retailer jettison cashiers — and the latest to discover how hard that is.

Going back to the debut of the free Square card reader, the mobile payments market has made fees — or the lack of fees — a major selling point.

Brick-and-mortar stores are rapidly adding self-checkout options usually linked to proprietary mobile apps, giving merchants more control over how payment options are presented.

The world’s most profitable car manufacturer is investing $1 billion in Singapore’s Grab Holdings Inc., valuing Southeast Asia’s largest car-hailing service at just over $10 billion.

MyBucks plans to give away entry-level smartphones, loaded with the company's financial technology, to encourage mobile payments, mobile banking and broader access to digital services in Africa, where financial innovation often moves quickly.

Merchants are interested in new payments technology, but there's still an understanding gap that keeps cash a viable option.

New Jersey’s commuter rail and bus system is joining the movement to add contactless payment options for commuters, which observers say could spark broader adoption of mobile payments across the U.S.

Mastercard's Cardless ATM service, developed with Diebold Nixdorf, resembles the technology many banks have adopted in the last few years — but Mastercard's offering sheds the limitation of being tied to a specific bank's ATMs.

Payroll needs can be tricky — especially on the open seas, where cruise staffers often have to go through several expensive steps to cash out their paychecks.

The cashierless Amazon Go store is barely more than an experiment — it's live in only one location in Seattle, with plans for a handful of stores to follow this year — but it has already sparked a race to put similar models in place.

Redwood CU's home-grown pay-by-text solution won a prestigious award recently, but the credit union is already looking at ways to build even more functionality into it.

Consumers using Paysafe's prepaid cards can now make online purchases in the Google Play store as part of a partnership with Google.

Comdata has been processing corporate payments for almost 50 years, paying truck drivers through a proprietary fuel card network. But its next chapter could be its toughest.

Following the path paved by the checkout-free Amazon Go concept, the newly merged Albertsons and Rite Aid are developing their own technologies for faster and more efficient checkouts.

The City of London, in collaboration with iZettle, is introducing the world’s first contactless card payment scheme for street performers. And as PayPal completes its purchase of iZettle, it's likely that this technology will spread to the U.S.

Denmark-based Nets is merging with Concardis Payment Group, a leading merchant payment service provider in German-speaking regions of Europe.

Two major Canadian banks, Bank of Montreal and Simplii Financial, have become victims of hacks that affected some 50,000 and 40,000 customers respectively. Neither bank decided to pay the ransom by the hackers' May 28 deadline.

Virtual reality is seeing significant leaps in technology, with immediate applications to gaming and entertainment that foreshadow richer applications for VR in commerce.

It's vital to be in touch with consumer shopping and payment tastes for individual retail categories and consumer groups. That may or may not include removing cash and human interaction, according to Andrew Wind, principal product manager at Worldpay.

As consumers spend more time interacting over social media and messaging platforms, those providers are making sure that they can also make payments related to any topic of conversation. But the arrival of Apple Pay Cash is complicating the market.