Mobile Wallets

There wasn’t a Regular Joe in the room, but that didn’t stop a panel of payments professionals Tuesday from probing the consumer psyche to discern why mobile wallets aren’t more popular. As a percentage of point-of-sale transactions, most experts agree that the major general-purpose mobile wallets—Apple Pay, Android Pay, and …

Consumers have a new option when choosing a fitness device that’s capable of making a contactless payment. Fitbit Inc., a San Francisco-based maker of fitness trackers, announced its Ionic smart watch Monday that includes Fitbit Pay, the company’s first foray into contactless payments. Fitbit Pay, which will be available when …

Now that financial institutions have launched a digital peer-to-peer payment service called Zelle to battle popular nonbank services like Venmo, the rival platforms are likely to divide up a rapidly growing market but will also face pressure to find ways to charge for the service. While overall U.S. P2P dollar …

USA Technologies Inc., a provider of payment services for vending machines and other unattended merchant locations, said Tuesday the number of connections in its ePort network grew 32% year-over-year to 568,000 as of June 30, and transaction volume nearly as much. The Malvern, Pa.-based firm also reported net income of …

It’s what some may consider a bold forecast for contactless payments in the United States, but Juniper Research is predicting that, by 2022, 34% of electronic payments will be contactless, up from less than 2% in 2017. United Kingdom-based Juniper released its forecast Monday in a report called “POS and …

A pioneering mobile-payment wallet for mass transit has reached a milestone. Chicago’s Ventra app has been downloaded more than 2 million times since it became available in November 2015, according to an announcement Monday from Cubic Transportation Systems, the San Diego-based company that developed the app. Commuters have bought almost …

There’s some good news for U.S. debit card issuers in the form of reduced fraud rates, according to the 2017 Debit Issuer Study released Monday by Pulse, the electronic funds transfer network owned by Discover Financial Services. The fraud-loss rate for signature-debit transactions fell 30% from 2015’s 2.6 cents per …

The estimated number of U.S. ATMs—including those deployed by financial institutions and independent operators, and branded machines—increased 10.5% to at least 475,000 and as many as 500,000, the ATM Industry Association said this week. The previous estimate, released in 2015, was 430,000, says David Tente, ATMIA’s executive director for the …

Litigation between CardFree Inc. and Scvngr Inc., better known as LevelUp, has taken a nasty turn in recent weeks, with LevelUp accusing CardFree of high-pressure tactics outside the courtroom and CardFree charging LevelUp with more instances of fraudulent access to its mobile order-ahead-and-pay system. In its June 21 answer to …

Chinese tourism abroad has already taken off, and it’s expected to grow ever larger in coming years, lifting sales for merchants in the United States and other parts of the world. The latest company to set itself up to cash in on the trend is Marriott International Inc., which on …