As speculation mounts around Apple’s plans for mobile payments and the tremors the company could create among mobile wallet providers, Apple might be prepping to launch its own digital currency.
Citi has chosen the ‘headliner’ finalists for its mobile innovation competition in Latin America, the Mobile Challenge LatAm 2014, which aims to bring together individuals and companies with innovative ideas to create applications for Citi’s Latin America mobile banking platform.
The spread of m-POS platforms has accelerated the decline of cash, according to a new report revealing that the volume of cash used in POS transactions in the U.S. dropped 10 percent between 2012 and 2013.
Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Bank has launched a mobile banking service which offers basic mobile banking features to Kazakh, Russian and English=speaking customers.
The speed at which the mobile market evolves is staggering. Just as we started to look at mobile first, where banks need to align their services and strategies to cater for mobile before desktop or other traditional channels, the notion of mobile-only is now creeping to the fore.
Five months after UnionPay’s partnership with Rev Worldwide to expand its prepaid market opportunities globally, payment network UnionPay is spending a sizable chunk of change to promote card and mobile app usage for online purchases to cardholders within China.
As speculation grows that Apple will include NFC technology in its next-generation iPhone, another clue came to light last week, when the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application filed by the company for an NFC antenna design
Mobile app providers might be overlooking a key demographic as they try to develop the right mix of form and function that will help their apps gain traction with a large population of consumers.
The European mobile payments market continues to draw the interest of investors, with London-based mobile payment and loyalty app Yoyo landing $5 million in seed investment.
A new mobile wallet platform from InComm is capitalizing on the company’s prepaid expertise to offer wallet providers a multitude of features, possibly giving InComm a competitive boost and signaling a shift in the prevailing business model. T
Despite skepticism that the path to widespread NFC-based mobile payments is in the SIM card, global shipments of NFC-enabled SIM cards more than doubled last year, and the SIMalliance expects such growth to continue.
Don’t get bogged down by existing technological limitations—they will inevitably fade with the march of innovation—and the future will be beyond what you can imagine.
More than two years after the UK’s FSA introduced rules on mobile call recording for financial institutions, more than half of those affected still have not rolled out a solution – leaving many at risk of enforcement action, according to a new report by analyst firm Ovum and computer telephony specialist Teleware.
At the launch of the All Payments Expo Europe today in Marbella, Spain, speakers invariably turned to the topic of mobile, with strong emphasis on (and statistics to support) meeting the needs of merchants participating in mobile payments services and the consumers who use them.
Apple’s recent deal with China’s UnionPay on a pair of contactless payment initiatives may be a sign that the tech giant is ready to make a major move into NFC payments, including equipping the next generation of the iPhone with NFC technology.
Incentives may be working for Isis, which says consumers activated an average of 20,000 mobile wallets per day over the past 30 days. But activations don’t necessarily equal continued usage.
“Winners” will be those platforms that are flexible enough to accommodate the breakneck pace of technological advancement.
Square, no stranger to experimentation, this week surprised observers by pulling its Square Wallet from the Apple and Google stores three years after its launch and introducing an order-ahead app for cafes and restaurants.
Apple Inc. is joining the push to accommodate EMV cards in its stores with its EasyPay m-POS, which uses a special iPhone case made by VeriFone that employees may use for customer checkout.
Citi is hosting a major new mobile innovation competition in Latin America. Called the Mobile Challenge LatAm 2014, the competition aims to bring together individuals and companies with innovative ideas to create applications for Citi’s Latin America mobile banking platform.
Facebook has already conquered the social media sphere—and now there are signs the company is seeking to capitalize on its global ubiquity and massive user base to make a splash as a money transfer service, recently partnering with financial service providers on transfer initiatives around the globe.
HSBC has installed free Wi-Fi in 650 of its UK branches, bringing the bank into line with Barclays, which introduced free Wi-Fi in February 2013. Both banks signed deals with BT to provide the connectivity, which is managed by BT as a white label service.
As contactless and mobile payment methods continue to grow, building societies and other financial institutions need to avoid being complacent about new technology, according to senior delegates speaking at the BSA annual conference in Manchester this week.
San Diego-headquartered Quippi is taking the fees out of remittances by offering gift cards that can be purchased online or in-store in the U.S. and redeemed by recipients in Mexico.
Digital gift cards are getting a boost in Canada as Blackhawk Network and Rogers Communications have opened Blackhawk’s digital gift card platform to users of the Rogers suretap mobile wallet app.
A group of the biggest financial institutions in the U.K. have banded together to launch a new P2P mobile payments system that by year-end will be accessible to 9 out of 10 bank account holders in the U.K.
Australia’s Commonwealth Bank could be looking to get out ahead of Square’s eventual arrival Down Under.
Confusion and concern over security is cited over and over again as the biggest barrier to widespread consumer uptake of mobile payments. And no wonder – confidence in the protection of sensitive cardholder data lies at the heart of trust in this technology. An EMV card as a physical asset is cryptographically secure. How can we emulate this security with something that is virtual?
Several major payments players recently have thrown their weight behind host card emulation (HCE), the technology many believe could be the key to finally bringing NFC-based mobile payments into the mainstream.
U.S. Bank is going real-time with its P2P offerings and adding a few key new features in a field where the P2P ambitions of companies like Square, Google and Amazon are generating considerable interest.
First the Wall Street Journal reported in November that Square Inc. was considering an IPO. Then acquisition rumors swirled after the newspaper reported this week that Square had been in M&A talks with companies including Google, Apple and PayPal.
Consumers may be embracing mobile apps, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re comfortable with or even aware of what their apps can do, a new study suggests.
LevelUp is tinkering again with the transaction fees it charges merchants for participating in its mobile wallet, cutting the cost from 2 percent to 1.95 percent as the SCVNGR-owned company seeks an appropriate balance for its bottom line.
Payment services provider Adyen has reported that one in five payments made on its network are now being made using a mobile device – a finding that reflects the rise of mobile payments worldwide, according to the firm.
While Google Wallet forges partnerships with merchants that don’t rely on NFC, one of contactless payments’ most high-profile skeptics may be coming around to seeing some real potential in the technology.
As campus identification cards doubling as reloadable prepaid cards become more prevalent on college campuses, they’re also becoming more integrated into student life via smartphone.
The thus-far sluggish rate of mobile wallet adoption in the U.S. has been attributed to a range of factors, from security concerns, to lack of widespread merchant acceptance to the familiarity and convenience of traditional plastic payment cards. But according to a new report from TSYS, what might be holding mobile wallets back has less to do with the mobile and more to do with the wallet.
Baidu Inc., China’s version of Google, has entered the mobile wallet arena, pitting the country’s most popular search engine against the likes of Alibaba and Tencent Holding Inc., both of which launched mobile wallets last year.
Facebook is putting the pieces in place to launch a money transfer service in Europe.
FIS wants to help banks in the pursuit of the coveted millennial consumer by focusing heavily on mobile banking.
