Hawk Incentives, a Blackhawk Network business that provides rewards and incentive solutions, has unveiled a new open-loop Mastercard prepaid card that can be added to major mobile wallets.
As some celebrate 10 years of contactless payments, Bastian Knoppers discusses why cards (not mobile wallets) are still king outside the U.S. and what it will take for the U.S. to catch up to the rest of the world on tap-and-go payments.
LevelUp’s nearly 1 million active users, as well as Chase Pay mobile wallet users, will have access to thousands more restaurants for order- and pay-ahead options, thanks to a deal with Onosys.
Alipay is zipping along in terms of its international expansion. With its latest partnership, the world’s largest online and mobile payment platform operated by Ant Financial Services Group, is now available for Mainland Chinese tourists at all 242 Starbucks branches across Malaysia.
The most popular digital wallet in Singapore has rolled out the first virtual Visa card in the country thanks to a partnership between global technology group and 2017 Pay Awards Change Agent of the Year Wirecard and Singtel.
Alipay has inked a slew of partnerships lately. The latest deal for the Chinese app is with Yelp and connects local businesses with Chinese travelers, a move that’s likely to boost loyalty and transaction volume in one fell swoop.
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.
The partnerships keep coming for PayPal. Following recent news that the company is partnering with Apple for payments on iTunes and in the App Store, the company announced July 17 that it’s expanding its partnership with Samsung to enable PayPal as a payment method in any channel Samsung Pay is accepted.
Wirecard and Tencent are working together to give European retailers access to more than 938 million active WeChat and Weixin users by enabling QR code payments at the POS.
After launching in 2016 in Singapore, Australia and Mexico, Citi Pay has arrived in the U.S. and is enabling tokenized payments via existing online credentials.
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 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.
WeChat is on the move again. The China-based social messaging and mobile wallet platform plans to expand its presence in Europe and the U.S., efforts that could bring it better relationships with advertisers, brands and payment providers.
Samsung Pay took another stride this week, with ExxonMobil announcing that its customers can now use the mobile wallet at the pump to pay for gas. This expansion comes only months after Samsung launched a points-based rewards program for Samsung Pay.
Another bell has tolled for the mobile payment service operated by the nearly 3-year-old MCX, a consortium of large retailers. JPMorgan Chase, whose own Chase Pay mobile wallet has been making serious strides, has acquired the technology that underpins CurrentC, the MCX mobile payment product that never went beyond pilot stage.
Mastercard and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) in Singapore have teamed up to launch a pilot program enabling commuters to pay for transit fares using contactless payment cards through an account-based ticketing (ABT) system. Although the tap-and-go pilot hasn’t begun yet, the next step of enabling consumers to use mobile wallets and wearables already is in the works.
Pay Award-winning Virtual Piggy said Feb. 14 it soon will begin testing a mobile wallet for consumers age 17 and younger, the latest move in the parent-supervised world of mobile payments.
Amid India’s recent boom in m-wallet transaction volume following a government discontinuation of two popular currency notes, the government now is considering developing an insurance framework for mobile wallet and electronic transactions. Government officials from the IT Ministry already have begun discussions with m-wallet providers and insurance companies on how to insure money in the wallet apps, according to The Financial Express.
