Credit unions are making fast progress in their rollout of EMV chip cards, according to an update from PSCU, a major payments processor for this segment of the financial-services industry. Some 85% of PSCU’s clients have introduced, or are introducing, EMV credit cards, while the corresponding number for EMV debit …

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. decided to recruit order-ahead capability for its Chase Pay mobile wallet, it settled on a 6-year-old mobile payments startup whose technology could give Chase Pay a vital boost in a crucial merchant segment. Meanwhile, the alliance could also bring tens of millions of new customers …

With online sales soaring, physical retailers are faced with the challenge of how to recreate the convenience of e-commerce in a traditional store. On Tuesday, a 4-year-old startup called Five Elements Robotics unveiled a device that promises to help with that challenge by putting robots at the service of consumers. Once in …

Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit will launch two new smart watches in the first quarter of 2017 that will run on the new Android Wear 2.0 platform and will support Android Pay, Google’s mobile-payments service. Jeff Chang, product manager for Android Wear, announced the news in an interview with The Verge, a tech Web …

It’s still far from a mainstream currency, but Bitcoin is closing out a tumultuous year with a raging run-up in value. The digital currency breached the $800 level on Tuesday, and as of Wednesday afternoon was trading just shy of $822. These are heights Bitcoin hasn’t seen in nearly three …

When it comes to the U.S. EMV conversion, it seems as if everything has proceeded more slowly than anyone had expected. Merchants have been slow to adopt the chip technology, EMV certifications have been slow in coming, and consumers and merchants alike have even complained about slow transactions. But now, …

Chatbot developer Kasisto Inc. has agreed to provide a so-called smartbot for Varo Money Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of a mobile-only banking app. Both the app and the bot are in beta testing and expected to launch early next year. The new bot, called Val, is based on conversational …

The NFC Forum, the Wakefield, Mass.-based organization that supports near-field communication technology, on Monday announced updates to three technical specifications and introduced a “candidate” spec. NFC is the technology most often used, for example, to link mobile wallets with point-of-sale terminals. One update, to “NFC Controller Interface (NCI) Technical Specification Version 2.0,” …

An offshoot of artificial-intelligence research, chatbots emerged in 2016 as a popular technology for reaching and serving consumers for banking, payments, and shopping. Facebook’s Messenger app, which began supporting the bits of code this spring, was by September already crawling with 30,000 bots holding conversations with consumers to fulfill simple …

Startups and established players alike have been working out payments applications for distributed-ledger technology for several years, and on Thursday one of those applications went commercial. San Francisco-based Wyre, founded in 2013, launched its cross-border payments service based on the blockchain. On the same day, Wyre also raised $5.8 million in a …