Mobile wallets

Lacy Morris would seem to be in a tough spot as the main techie for a smaller coffee chain that's deploying mobile technology years after Starbucks dominated the market. But Starbucks has made missteps, he contends, leaving room for rivals to learn from those mistakes.

The partnership PayPal announced last year with Samsung Pay has come to fruition, with PayPal rolling out a new capability enabling its users to make purchases at any store that accepts cards via Samsung Pay.

LevelUp had a lot of failed experiments along the way, but it still won over major partners and is seeing new results in the restaurant industry.

Before Paytm became one of India's most popular mobile wallets, it was a little-known bill payment app that launched in 2011 and spread by word of mouth. Now Paytm is revisiting that history in Canada, though its challenges in North America are very different than what it faced in India.

Wirecard has expanded capabilities of its boon digital payment app by partnering with Fitbit so customers in Europe may make contactless payments with the Fitbit Ionic or Fitbit Versa smartwatch models.

India’s Unified Payment Interface is a model that other developing economies can emulate, as they look to move away from cash-centricity and overhaul their own payments infrastructure in pursuit of speed, security, auditability and financial inclusion, writes Anoop Villait, managing director of corporate development at Transpay.

Companies that aspire to be the Uber of their industry should take a second look at the ride-sharing market, where Grab has become a lightning rod of payments investment and innovation.

Some of the biggest digital wallets in the world — including Alipay and WeChat Pay — succeed because they have very little in common with other big-brand wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.

The threat that mobile would displace plastic never came to be. But the new technology — often developed by retailers and other nonbanks — nevertheless forced issuers to take stock of their own offerings.

President Trump's isolationism is colliding head-on with a lucrative trend of Chinese tourists coming to the U.S. looking — and payments companies are caught in the crossfire.