Radio Frequency Technology

The surprising revelation by J.C. Penney Co. Inc. over the weekend that it had ceased acceptance of contactless payments unmasked the little-noticed ability of contactless mobile wallets to work with point-of-sale technology that far predates them but which Visa Inc. wants banished. The blend of old and new has worked …

Sonarax, an ultrasonic-communications company, unveiled a new protocol for enabling devices, including ATMs and those capable of mobile payments, to communicate with one another. Israel-based Sonarax says its technology enables pairing of devices and data transfer on both encrypted and open channels using frequencies that are beyond human hearing capabilities. …

In four years, the Starbucks mobile-payment service, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, will continue to garner large shares of users, but not as much as they do today. That’s the forecast from research firm eMarketer Inc., released Tuesday. Of the four major mobile-payments services, Starbucks Corp.’s app will …

North America’s largest payments company on Thursday said it expects to receive a $1 billion bonus from the federal tax-reform bill passed into law in December. In contrast with its rival Mastercard Inc., which reported earlier in the day it recorded an $873 million charge in the fourth quarter related …

South Korea-based consumer-electronics giant LG Electronics plans to bring its LG Pay mobile-payments service to the U.S. in a few months. But with its smart phones in the hands of only 10% of American consumers, how much market share LG Pay can capture and how it can distinguish itself from …

The huge CES (formerly the Consumer Electronics Show) expo is underway in Las Vegas, and out of it are coming the latest whiz-bang developments in payment technology. Among them: connected cars that enable the driver to pay for gas with a Visa card and authenticate the transaction with an iris …

Contactless payments got a big boost Wednesday when the New York City area’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority approved a $539.5 million contract with San Diego-based Cubic Transportation Systems to install a near-field communication-based payment system across all MTA transit and commuter-rail systems that includes open-loop payments. The deal means MTA riders …

A Cincinnati-based startup called LISNR is promoting technology that transmits payment data over sound waves. The technology, which the company demonstrated Tuesday at the Money 20/20 financial-technology conference in Las Vegas, is now open for beta and can be used as an alternative to near-field communication, the company said. It …

PayPal Holdings Inc. has changed in ways large and small since Dan Schulman took over as chief executive two years ago, but perhaps its biggest change is its willingness to embrace collaboration with financial institutions, payment networks, and others once seen as keen rivals. At least some vindication of that …

In today’s 4G world, connected homes allow you to turn on lights, turn down thermostats, or activate sprinklers, all remotely. Wearables wake you up and tell you how long and how well you slept. Fingerprints, faces, even the rhythm of your heart are replacing passwords. There’s a lot happening on the connectivity …