Mobile payments

Alibaba is investing billions into mobile ordering technology in China — but what is more fundamentally American than spending large amounts of money on food?

Despite more bank and investor activity around digital P2P payments, consumer usage of P2P is a mixed bag.

With smaller screen sizes and increased levels of distractions ranging from a text or a notification, pitfalls in the checkout process can result in more abandoned carts than successful transactions, writes Andre Lyver, director of engineering for financial services at Shopify.

Microchip implants could be considered the ultimate form of mobile payment — skipping the smartphone altogether in favor of giving people bionic abilities. And a small segment of the population is already lining up to try it out.

Digital money transfer provider SimbaPay has added an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot that will enable banks and other companies to offer international money transfer to customers across Africa and Europe through text messaging.

As the agency pulls back its enforcement efforts, it opens the door for state authorities to pursue more cases against financial startups for their data collection and privacy practices.

By aligning, the two companies hope to offer efficiencies in a fiercely competitive business payments market.

PSD2's open banking wave is attracting lots of attention from payments technology firms, and Zafin is making moves to cement its place in the market.

The problem is that, like usernames and passwords, biometrics are a static form of identity that can be exploited rather than a dynamic method that's of little use to crooks if stolen.

Extending this functionality into corporate cards has the potential to make the commercial payments process more seamless and secure, writes Russell Bennett, chief technology officer at Fraedom.

The voice-activated payment option through Assistant has been added to Google Pay's features to address situations in which consumers have to pay someone back, for example, after a weekend activity.

Samsung Pay became available Thursday, allowing users to load UniCredit credit cards, MyPay and MyOne prepaid and debit cards for payment directly from the Samsung Pay app.

With 1.3 billion people who are mostly unbanked in an economy where 85% to 95% of all transactions are still conducted in cash, few other markets have such an opportunity to modernize payments.

The speed at which money transfer payments are evolving from legacy, paper-based systems to digital platforms couldn’t be more stark at Western Union, where Sheri Rhodes has just been named executive vice president and chief technology officer.

The main problem is that Amazon's Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant can’t yet verify a person’s identity. But there are already workarounds for that issue — and the tech giants may solve it soon.

BBVA has started testing a facial recognition payment application for employees to use at cafeterias and restaurants at the Ciudad BBVA office and business conference complex in Madrid.

Affirm Inc., a startup from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, is going after millennials with a new kind of credit card alternative that only exists online.

Assuming that a wireless protocol is to be deployed for ease of use, the key decision to be made is the transport for communication between In-vehicle infotainment system (IVI) system and pump, writes Jim Carroll, chief technology officer at Mobica.

There are signs that the wearable payments market is starting to come into focus. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it's destined for success.

While building consumer trust in these new payments methods will undoubtedly take time, the possibility of freeing consumers from physical payment objects — cash, cards, phones — would be transformative, writes Beatta McInerney, business development manager for payments at ScanSource.