MCX, a retailer-driven mobile commerce initiative, is being steadily built upon retailers' desire to control their own customer data and possibly lessen the sting of, or bypass totally, card payment interchange fees. But it must still deliver two key things: a brand and a product.

MagicBand, a system that Walt Disney Co. has been testing all year with a limited number of employees and Walt Disney World resort patrons, seems to be poised for success based on what looks like an extreme level of commitment to it — so far.

Atlanta, Ga.-based Cardlytics Inc. plans to support location-based card-linked marketing with push notifications in the first quarter of 2014.

If you stop by bar Room77 in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood for a beer, you can leave the euros in your wallet and instead pay with the digital currency Bitcoin—a growing phenomenon in Germany and other countries that are changing their views on the currency.

By adding Popmoney person-to-person payments to its primary mobile banking application, PNC Bank is putting the feature where its most tech-savvy customers expect to see it.

COLUMBIA, S.C. – Carolina Collegiate FCU has signed with Shastic to implement the company’s online loan calculator for Facebook, called Calcubot.

Fiserv will expand Instant Payments to the mobile version of its Popmoney person-to-person payment system in November.

MasterCard is placing more emphasis on things like airline boarding, wearable computing and many other things the card network contends can be used to win a consumer's business long before the payment is made.

An analytics dashboard developed by Spreedly and Shopify tracks and rates online payments gateways based on their processing speed and rate of declined transactions.

Versafe doesn't trust consumers to take the necessary precautions to protect their devices. So the company built a fraud protection layer within its banking application to take matters out of users' hands.

Card marketing and technology company Dynamics launched a new game-based rewards system that card issuers can use with traditional plastic cards, with Key Bank among the first issuers to offer the program to consumers.

Core Innovation Capital, the investment partner of the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), has made an investment in Wipit Inc., a mobile payments company focused on unbanked consumers.

HealthcarePays (HCP), a member-owned payment network, has partnered with technology developer StoneEagle to sell an electronic payments system.

DoubleBeam is using electronic checks in its mobile payment system to cut merchants' costs on interchange.

Bank technology vendor Yodlee has a new mobile and Web app called Tandem that allows consumers to manage their personal relationships and the financial obligations that go along with those relationships.

As more financial institutions and other companies turn to cloud-based services to maintain customer contact centers, Echopass Corp. says it has strengthened its position to assure data handled in those centers remains secure.

The Societe de transport de Montreal (STM) is testing a loyalty program that ties user preferences and special offers to transit payment cards, a move that's also designed to shift rider volume from peak times.

MasterCard Inc. and a major wireless carrier in the Netherlands will join three Dutch banks in reviving a Near Field Communication-based mobile payment test that was nearly three years in the making.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Pikes Peak CU has signed with CheckAlt, iParse and CU Wireless as its providers for mobile deposit capture.

BOULDER, Colo. – Premier Members CU has deployed Integrated Media Management’s Document Exchange, its cloud-based eSignature solution.