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 …

• Rambus Inc. introduced its Rambus Unified Payment Platform, which it says will enable mobile-wallet users to pay with credit, points, and coupons in a single transaction. • Payments provider Harbortouch Payments LLC announced a partnership with Strategic Funding Source, a merchant cash-advance provider. • Square Inc. will pay $54.8 million to Starbucks Corp. to cancel …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews It has become an article of faith that mobile payments capability alone won’t excite consumers. The challenge lies in how to meld loyalty with payments in a single tap at checkout for multiple retail chains. On Friday, Urban Airship Inc. announced an integration of its Reach …

By Rick Oglesby @DTPaymentNews PayPal Holdings Inc. has always been an enigma. It’s not really a payment network, not really an independent sales organization or merchant acquirer, not really a wallet or a prepaid card issuer, not really a person-to-person payments solution, and not really a payment gateway. Yet, it …

• The National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association on Tuesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let stand an appellate court’s ruling last June striking down the controversial 2012 settlement between merchants on the one side and Visa, Mastercard, and some big banks on the other in a long-running antitrust class …

Gulf Oil L.P. becomes the latest fuel retailer to offer its own mobile-payment app with the introduction Tuesday of Gulf Pay. The service, scheduled to be tested at some New England and New York locations in the first half of 2017, eventually will accept Mastercard Inc.’s Masterpass digital wallet. Further …

• Merchant processor SignaPay Ltd. announced the official launch of its PayLo software, which allows merchants to collect what the company calls a “small” service fee on each transaction processed on merchants’ point-of-sale terminals. The fee is waived if the customer uses cash or a gift card. SignaPay says the software is …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews As retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Kohl’s Corp. ramp up their mobile wallets, the tech companies that offer general-purpose SimplyTapp Inc. developed the original HCE technology. Google, now the main subsidiary of Mountain View, Calif.-based Alphabet, included HCE in late 2013 in Android 4.4, also …

• Abilene Diagnostic Clinic has adopted the One Bill solution from health-care payments processor InstaMed, allowing patients to deal with a single statement embracing all ADC locations. • In related news, Change Healthcare, a specialist in analytics software, introduced Personalized Communications for its billing and payments solution. The new service is aimed at billing …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews A year ago, Visa Inc. expanded its Visa Ready program beyond mobile point-of-sale terminals to support tokenized payments on a wide variety of Internet-connected devices. On Thursday, the payments company took the next step in that plan, announcing a collaboration with IBM Corp. that will allow …