Payments

The iPhone is 10 years old. Here’s a look at some of the ways the Apple product and the boom in smartphones overall have shaped banking in the U.S. over the past decade.

More consumers will soon be able to withdraw cash at ATMs by using their mobile phones as a remote control via Cardtronics, which has decided to extend FIS Cardless Cash to all of its U.S. ATMs over the next two years.

The Token ring's approach is reminiscent of Amazon's Echo devices, which are bland monolithic speakers that can be loaded with "skills" to enable them to place calls, make purchases, activate light switches and tell jokes.

More e-commerce and multi-channel merchants are accepting payments from mobile devices, even though they haven't addressed all of the security gaps inherent to the technology.

Apple's plans to display a bright blue bar on iPhone screens when an application is monitoring the user's location may feel like a threat to location-based marketing. More likely, it is an overdue wake-up call for retailers and banks to improve their communication about the benefits of location data.

The move to faster processing has a lot of names, but the most important advancement will be the certainty that the transaction was successfully completed, writes Gene Neyer, head of industry and regulation at Finastra.

International cross-border transaction enabler TransferTo has partnered with the e-commerce platform MallforAfrica enabling nearly 300 million African consumers with mobile money accounts to shop abroad.

Toronto-based nanopay Corp. is making MintChip, a digital currency it acquired in 2015 from the Royal Canadian Mint, available to merchants looking for a lower-cost payments channel by leveraging digital cash.

LendUp is seeking to differentiate itself from competitors by making fast loan decisions and designing its customer experience around the mobile phone.

Not content to have Amazon and Walmart steal all the thunder, Target has begun a pilot of a grocery delivery service called “Restock,” with terms that are designed specifically to make its rivals look slower and more expensive.

Chinese tourists visiting Spain will be able to shop at Spanish stores using their Alipay mobile wallets through an agreement between BBVA Group and Ant Financial Services, the Alibaba affiliate that operates Alipay.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will invest another $1 billion to raise its stake in online mall Lazada Group SA to 83 percent, securing control of a fast-growing startup at the vanguard of its Southeast Asian expansion.

Synchrony Financial and Alliance Data Systems are particularly vulnerable to recent shifts in Americans’ shopping habits, according to new research from Moody’s Investors Service.

Another goal of the integration is to encourage more small businesses to convert from paper to electronic payments.

Particularly at risk are service providers with high volumes of automated or customer-initiated debit payments, such as cell phone service providers, utilities, cable companies, insurance, and retailers.

Even with card defaults ticking up slightly, regional banks remain committed to pursuing more credit card business as they look to both diversify their balance sheets and deepen relationships with customers.

For Google and its peers the fine may be the beginning of increased regulatory scrutiny across other digital services within their ecosystems, including payments.

Verifone is focusing more on operating an open platform in which third-party developers and financial partners could build within Verifone point of sale network parameters.

The Westpac keyboard function, which helped support social payments, will be removed from the Apple store in July. The move follows a long dispute between banks and Apple over access to Apple Pay.

Visa Inc. is buying a stake in Swedish payments technology firm Klarna AB and forming a strategic partnership, as both companies aim to expand outside their core markets.