Green Dot Corp. sees continued strong demand for the mobile features of its iconic prepaid card and its GoBank checking account. And though the company hasn’t embraced Apple Pay or Android Pay, adding mobile payments access is on the company’s horizon, Steve Streit, Green Dot’s CEO, told attendees at PayThink in Las Vegas today.
London-based fintech startup Kerv has turned to crowd-funding site Kickstarter to raise mass-production capital to enter the field of wearables with an NFC-enabled ring that allows consumers to make contactless payments. The Kickstarter campaign launched Friday in an effort to raise nearly $117,000 and as of this morning, the company already has raised more than $52,000.
Voice-based user authentication systems are vulnerable to “voice impersonation attacks,” where criminals gain access to a sample of a user’s voice and use that sample to build a model of the user’s speech pattern with voice-morphing software, University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers say.
Square Inc. may be getting ready to file an initial public offering within the next two weeks, according to a report in Fortune magazine, adding weight to rumors going back more than two years about the m-POS company’s desire to go public.
As the mobile wallet providers battle for market share—the most recent being today’s expansion of Samsung Pay to the U.S.—a sobering percentage of cybersecurity experts expect mobile payment data breaches to climb over the next 12 months.
Samsung is hailing its mobile payment service Samsung Pay a success in South Korea a month after it launched in the country, citing more than $30 million in transaction volume and over 1.5 million transactions.
Barclays’ Pingit app, which began as a U.K. P2P service in 2012, now is available for users to make online purchases at tens of thousands of e-commerce Websites via mobile devices through a new partnership with Verifone, and Barclays says it hopes to extend the service to POS locations.
This month’s launch of Google Inc.’s Android Pay, just weeks before the U.S.’s Oct. 1 EMV liability shift date, is a key milestone in expanding mobile payments access to the majority of consumers, but we’re still “a couple of years” away from mainstream m-payments with ubiquitous support from banks, merchants and handset makers, predicts Dom Morea, senior vice president of business development for First Data Corp.
Financial services provider PayNearMe has partnered with 7-Eleven Inc. to launch the PayNearMe Bill Pay app, enabling consumers in the U.S. to pay more than 17,000 national and local billers, such as cable companies, utilities providers and insurance companies, with cash using a barcode scan at participating 7-Eleven stores.
BBVA Compass yesterday announced the launch of a new Visa-branded prepaid card and budgeting mobile app, ClearSpend, which the bank says will appeal to prepaid card users across all ages and income levels who want better control of their finances.
Shift4 Corp., a merchant payments gateway provider, today announced a software-based m-POS service enabling larger merchants to accept all types of payments anywhere—via any mobile device—without disrupting existing relationships with processors and acquirers, which analysts suggest is an example of a new breed of payments services.
Starbucks has rolled out its mobile ordering and payment service to all 7,400 of the coffee giant’s U.S. locations.
Apple Inc. is making good on its plan to bring Apple Pay to China, with news that it’s registered a subsidiary, Apple Technology Service (Shanghai) Ltd. in Shanghai’s free-trade zone, with permission to operate Apple Pay, but it’s already late to the m-payments party in China, say observers.
Royal Bank of Canada this week introduced a new—and still somewhat rare—approach to connecting its customers to its RBC Wallet mobile payments service via host card emulation (HCE), so it works with any NFC-based Android handset, regardless of its brand or the user’s wireless carrier.
Starting in January 2016, Sprint’s 57 million customers will have access to a revamped digital wallet, Sprint Money Express, through a joint initiative between the telecom and Urban FT, a provider of white-label digital banking apps.
San Francisco-based Stripe is hoping to accelerate the spread of buy buttons, this week unveiling Relay, a service enabling consumers to make a purchase from within a mobile app or a social media site like Twitter, without bouncing to a merchant’s e-commerce site.
Smartphones are becoming more integral to the shopping experience in the U.K., where consumers are increasingly using mobile devices to make in-store and online purchases and to research products, a new report found.
When Discover Financial Services goes live this week with Apple Pay, customers who’ve been waiting to access the m-payments service with a Discover card will get a chance to reap one of the richest rewards programs available for Apple Pay users.
The mobile payments race just kicked into high gear, with Google Inc. today announcing the immediate launch of Android Pay, joining Apple Pay with a little more than two weeks to go before Samsung Pay rolls out Sept. 28 in the U.S.
Digital wallet providers have an easier route to issuer integration with the new MasterCard Digital Enablement Express service, but one analyst suggests it may be more difficult for providers—outside of Apple Pay—to collect issuer fees.
PayPal more or less invented P2P payments with its core service enabling individuals to pay one another via email through various funding sources. Now it’s introduced a URL-based approach.
Samsung Pay is off to a brisk start in Korea after its launch there Aug. 20, about five weeks ahead of the mobile payment service’s pending debut in the U.S. on Sept. 28, but it’s nowhere near Apple Pay levels, which hit 1 million registered cards in the first 72 hours.
Digital gifting continues to make inroads, with more than half of consumers surveyed by Blackhawk Network reporting the purchase of an e-gift over the previous year.
Google Inc. in May said Android Pay would launch “soon,” and this week notifications surfaced at some McDonald’s stores suggesting the rollout could come as early as this week.
PayPal’s purchase last week of Chicago-based Modest—its first acquisition since its spinoff from eBay—could be the beginning of a major shopping spree.
Building on a contactless payments boom in Russia, Visa and Russian payment services provider QIWI have integrated Visa’s payWave contactless technology into the Visa QIWI Wallet, providing millions of users with a new mobile payment option at contactless terminals.
Mobile commerce providers and retailers left a potential $24.5 billion in revenue on the table because of user experience issues, according to a new report from Jumio Inc.
Mobile phones will take an increasingly leading role in the payments space over the next five years as a result of technologies that allow safe storage of payment details in smartphones, according to a report prepared by the Consult Hyperion on behalf of Payments UK.
Apple Inc.’s plan to roll out Apple Pay soon in Australia—which has a high penetration of contactless cards and NFC terminals—has hit a snag as the country’s largest banks balk at paying the toll Apple requires, according to reports.
The State Bank of India this week enters India’s increasingly competitive mobile wallet field with “SBI Buddy,” an m-wallet enabling consumers to make purchases directly from participating merchants’ e-commerce offerings.
There has been hype around wearable technology for some time now but only now is it reaching market maturity with the introduction and subsequent adoption by consumers of smart watches and wristbands. Just as we saw with smart phones and tablets, consumer technology, in this case wearables, has the potential to have a huge impact on the business world. The implications for the financial services industry are significant
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. today announced that Samsung Pay will launch next week in Korea and on Sept. 28 will get in the m-wallet ring with Apple Pay in the U.S., enabling consumers with the latest generation of Samsung’s handsets to tap their devices and pay contactlessly “nearly everywhere” cards are accepted, including NFC-ready locations and those that are not yet NFC-ready, the company said.
Financial technology investment remains hot, with several fintech providers involved in major acquisitions announced over the past week.
MasterCard, Canada’s TD Bank Group and technology provider Nymi, formerly Bionym, are getting to the heart of payments security.
Pharmacy retailer Rite Aid this week said it will resume NFC acceptance at its 4,600 stores nationwide beginning Aug. 15, following months disabling contactless payments acceptance in the wake of Apple Pay’s rollout.
To compete in a mobile world, financial services providers must focus on speed, convenience and security when designing mobile banking and payments services, according to a new report.
Target is tackling showrooming and hopes to increase shopper engagement with its latest test of location-based beacon technology in 50 of its stores, with a nationwide rollout slated for later this year.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) this week sent a letter to the retail consortium Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), which is readying the launch of its CurrentC mobile payments service, demanding details about its exclusivity policy requiring participants to block rival mobile wallets, along with other information.
Swiss exchange group SIX and Swiss telecoms company Swisscom are planning to create a Switzerland-wide, universal mobile payment solution in collaboration with banks. The plan encompasses shopping as well as peer-to-peer payments.
Green Dot Corp. is using barcode-generation technology to enable customers to add cash to their accounts using their mobile devices at more than 65,000 retailers in its reload network.
