Several major payments companies released second-quarter earnings this week, including The Bancorp, Discover, Mastercard and PayPal. Overall, payments volume is on the rise and partnerships are proving particularly important for PayPal, which has been on tear with recent strategic announcements.
It’s been a busy week for mobile wallet partnerships. Several companies announced deals to offer mobile wallets to their customers in the U.K., Australia and Europe. Challenger bank Starling says it’s the first in the U.K. to offer in-app provisioning.
Can a mobile payment service gain users by offering instant access to credit card accounts? Walmart is about to find out. The retail giant has launched a program that enables Walmart Pay customers to spend via their credit lines immediately upon approval instead of waiting for plastic cards to arrive.
Google has a new plan to become a bigger player in payments. The search engine and web marketing giant said that it’s enabling merchants and developers to “turbocharge checkout conversion” by making it easier for consumers to use the credit cards and debit cards stored with Google.
The Alipay online payment platform operated by Ant Financial Services Group is moving further into North America through an agreement with payments technology provider First Data. Alipay is considered the world’s largest online and mobile payment platform, with more than 450 million global active users.
Google is banking on mobile apps to boost its mobile wallet. The Android Pay parent has linked that service to a handful of banking apps, giving consumers the ability add their cards more quickly to the mobile wallet.
Look for Chase Pay at the POS at your local Best Buy, just in time for this year’s U.S. holiday shopping season, Chase announced Sept. 14. Chase this week also made a noteworthy security move. On Sept. 12, JPMorgan Chase—without announcing it—reversed its security position on its mobile app, removing the need to type in a password once a customer has already been authenticated by either Apple’s Touch ID or an Android biometric scan.
