Payments

Lee Seung-gun’s parents told him to get his sanity checked when he quit his secure job as a dentist with the hospital arm of Samsung Group to found a mobile apps startup.

Longtime Starbucks boss Howard Schultz was so invested in the company's mobile payments strategy that he once stepped down from his day-to-day duties to focus his full attention on the tech initiative. Without his involvement, will Starbucks lose its edge in fintech?

As contactless cards continue their momentum in the U.K., new use cases are popping up for the tap-and-go technology.

As competition from the bank-powered Zelle mounts, the popular social P2P app Venmo is phasing out support for online payments in favor of its mobile app.

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.

Different digital wallets are designed for different purposes and merchants should do their research and respond accordingly, writes Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap.

A business plan for bitcoin with consumer need behind it has yet to be proven, said Hikmet Ersek, CEO of Western Union.

Wirecard has created a blockchain-based B2B application to streamline payments for merchants buying raw materials like coffee, crude oil and steel.

The advancement of digital wallet technology in the past five years may be having a numbing effect on e-commerce merchants, who favor familiar brands over big-name wallet apps.

Security Group was fined $5 million for abusive collection tactics; the Dutch payments company is now valued at nearly $16 billion.

The simplified pricing of fintechs like Square and Stripe has finally caught up with banks' more complex fees, prompting Wells Fargo to restructure its billing for small businesses. Other banks will also face consequences—particularly community banks that depend on local merchants.

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.

Adyen NV, a Dutch payments processor whose clients include Netflix Inc. and Spotify Technology SA, more than doubled in its trading debut in Amsterdam.

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.

HSBC worked with Maritz marketing to tap AI to predict which categories of rewards—travel, merchandise, gift cards or dining—consumers were most likely to use, factoring in their seasonal tendencies and past behavior.

The mobile app's popularity was joined at the hip with Starbucks gift cards and loyalty points, a formula that has traditionally been known to work well at other retailers through plastic cards.

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

Users wishing to move holdings from, say, the Bitcoin to the Ethereum blockchain usually go to an exchange, and convert their Bitcoin into Ether. Along the way, they often pay sizable fees. Once interoperability becomes possible, some of these fees should disappear or decline