Square, the mobile-payments startup founded by Jack Dorsey, is giving small merchants the ability to sell gift cards to shoppers on the go, stepping up competition with eBay’s PayPal business.

Lots of financial institutions use social media as a marketing and consumer service tool, but few have figured out how to actually make money from it. Now some credit unions think they may have found an answer.

Even as credit unions continue to struggle with getting MBL legislation passed in Congress, there remains strong support among many CEOs for a bill.

Aiming to make the shopping experience less painful, mobile point-of-sale platform QThru launched an app that lets consumers bypass checkout lines and pay with their smartphones.

As banks dig deeper into mobile commerce, they’ll likely bump into industries like telecom and device manufacturing, where the development cycles and patent fights come much faster.

If large retailers felt a need to create their own mobile commerce brand through the Merchant Customer Exchange to lessen customer confusion and control transaction data, then smaller retailers must also feel overwhelmed with all of the mobile payment and commerce choices available.Starting Dec. 10, San Francisco-based CardFree hopes to address that problem as a new company helping merchants develop their own custom-branded mobile commerce tools.

OKLAHOMA CITY – ME/CU, the former Muncipal Employees CU, has signed with Sharetec to deploy the company’s mobile banking solution.

More than half of consumers in seven technology-advanced countries say they are interested in mobile payments. But the U.S. doesn’t crack the list of the top four countries in which residents say they’d consider replacing their plastic payment cards with mobile phones.

In the latest intersection of social media and financial services, “The End of Money” author David Wolman is selling digital copies of his book on Twitter for four days.

Chris Larsen, who disrupted consumer finance in the 1990s and 2000s with E-Loan and Prosper, is seeking to shake up the industry again with Ripple, a peer-to-peer payment and credit system.

Apple introduced its Passbook app — a wallet that stores other mobile wallets — alongside the iPhone 5 in September. Three months later, has Passbook revolutionized mobile payments? Or is it starving from lack of support?

Consumers can turn to a growing number of companies for financial products these days, but as Jamie Moldafsky sees it, everything comes back to relationship building—which Wells Fargo hopes will benefit from peer-to-peer payments and mobile technology.

Barcelona residents not yet conducting tap-and-go payments at merchant point of sale may soon find it easier to do so using their mobile phones.La Caixa continued its push to make contactless payments the accepted norm in Barcelona, announcing plans to issue up to 200,000 Tap Visa stickers that consumers can attach to the backs of their mobile phones.

Capital Access Network, Inc., a small-business finance provider, has named an advisory board to guide the launch and growth of its latest offering to small businesses, CapTap.

SEATTLE – School Employees Credit Union Of Washington has signed with Vertifi Software LLC to offer the CUSO’s DeposZip mobile remote deposit capture to its members.

The National ATM Council, a trade association that represents independent ATM providers across the U.S., has joined the forum created by the Smart Card Alliance to discuss and encourage payments industry collaboration in preparation for the country’s switch to EMV chip-card technology.

U.S. Bank in Minneapolis has committed to becoming the first large U.S. bank to offer mobile bill payment in the manner of mobile check deposit—letting users pay a bill by simply taking a picture of it with the camera on their smartphone or tablet.

Passengers on US Airways flights can now purchase food and beverages with a tap of their credit card.

Software developers at Korala Associates Limited figured they had a pretty solid pitch to banks: a machine they claim costs one-tenth of a traditional ATM, yet provides all of the banking services a customer would need while in a retail setting.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Redstone FCU on Wednesday began offering an online document storage service that allows members to load electronic files such as wills, mortgages and insurance documents, or other images, into the credit union’s online banking protected document library for free.