Mobile payments

Do the Black Friday and Cyber Monday retail holidays still have meaning in a world where sales promotions are perennial and e-commerce is embedded in nearly every form of digital communication? According to data, they do, and more now than ever.

PayPal is following its investment in micro-investing app with a direct link, vastly expanding the app's addressable market.

Successful mobile payment players such as Starbucks, Alipay and WeChat Pay all rely on optical scanning technology rather than NFC to execute payments. It's time the rest of the industry take note, writes Maikki Frisk, executive director of the Mobey Forum.

Visa is digging deep into the question of whether transit fare payments can influence habits in other settings.

With a solution that addresses the unique security, transaction speed and integration requirements of the transit environment, EMV contactless open payments for transit can become a reality and change our public transportation experiences for the better, writes Randy Vanderhoof, director of the U.S. Payments Forum.

As the banking industry moves closer to adopting a faster payments system, bank executives have begun to think through the impact it will have on clients and banks themselves.

Merchants’ fates are inextricably linked to what customers want. So, as they continue to embrace frictionless experiences, merchants are under mounting pressure to deliver or risk losing out, writes Joseph Daly, COO of North American Payment Processing for Paysafe.

U.K. startup Flux has signed up a few banks for its platform that delivers real-time receipts to mobile banking apps. The problem is that few retailers are interested, and experts say that’s not likely to change any time soon.

It may seem odd at first that Square is using the Cash app as a testbed for bitcoin, but if Square Cash is ever to distinguish itself from the bigger options in P-to-p, it needs to take risks that Square can't afford with its primary customer base.

One of the risks of omnichannel shopping is showrooming, where consumers browse products in person at a store but purchase online from a rival at a better price. This problem has existed for years in the brick-and-mortar world, and the maturation of digital shopping has caused showrooming to spread to more retailers.

As consumers’ personal information is compromised almost daily, hackers are increasingly targeting banks.

Transit transactions will increase card use and loyalty, and will generate the same sort of reputational boost London enjoys with Oyster, writes Andrey Tikhonov, director of payment technology for Infinite Peripherals.

Barclaycard is piloting a service to deliver instant digital purchase receipts to customers through a partnership with fintech startup Flux, which launched last year with the aim of eliminating paper receipts.

By learning from others’ mistakes, CUs may be in a position to make real strides forward in digital wallets, despite lackluster adoption rates seen in this space thus far.

The spread of Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Samsung's Bixby is changing the way consumers interact with technology. Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence is doing more than ever to handle and protect payments.

Most larger credit unions have reissued chip-enabled cards, but some small CUs have lagged — and it’s nearly impossible to get an industry-wide picture of where adoption stands.

India’s IDFC Bank and local mobile wallet provider MobiKwik are collaborating to provide a virtual prepaid Visa card for nearly 65 million MobiKwik users.

Call centers are becoming a prime target for fraud due to some shockingly lax controls and the ease of social engineering attacks in an environment where employees are trained to put the customer first.

USA Technologies, a provider of payments technology enabling card and mobile payments at vending machines in the U.S., is buying Cantaloupe Systems, which has its own line of vending machine payments solutions in the U.S. and other markets, for $85 million.

Messenger is one of Facebook's most requested services in the U.K. and France, making these markets ripe for the platform's new P-to-P payments capabilities. But in taking the service internationally, Facebook may also reveal its limitations.