Competitive Strategies

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 …

• Mobile in-store payments will total $91.7 billion by 2020, up from $18.7 billion this year, according to a report from Javelin Strategy & Research. Browser-based and in-app mobile payments, however, will dwarf that number, reaching $318.8 billion, nearly doubling 2016’s $161.3 billion. • Movie-ticketing platform Atom Tickets will integrate JPMorgan Chase & …

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 …

Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit has updated its Google Wallet to enable the person-to-person payments service to work on desktop computers and laptops using any browser. Google Wallet dates back to 2011 as a mobile-payments and P2P service, but in September 2015 Alphabet transferred the purchasing functionality to its Android Pay …

Consumers are making their shopping, and payments, preferences known this holiday season. They are spending 12% more on e-commerce purchases so far this shopping season than they did in 2015, reports comScore Inc. Consumers have made $49.3 billion in e-commerce purchases from Nov. 1 to Dec. 12 using a desktop computer at home …

• Yahoo! Inc. disclosed Wednesday a breach of more than 1 billion user accounts in August 2013 that is separate from one involving 500 million accounts the Web giant announced in September. Yahoo said the new breach involved names, email addresses, birth dates, secure passwords, and security questions and answers, but did not …

After PayPal Holdings Inc. in July signed a sweeping agreement with Visa Inc., and in September reached a similar deal with MasterCard Inc., giving PayPal access to the card networks’ token engines and thereby new access to the physical point of sale, observers wondered when the other shoe would drop. It dropped …

Bill payment continues to reign as the most-used payments feature of banks’ mobile apps, but mobile deposit and person-to-person payments are coming on strong, according to new findings from research firm Celent and FI Navigator Corp. The “Mobile Banking Quantified” study by Celent, a division of New York City-based of Oliver …

• Chip card standards body EMVCo reported that 42.4% of global general-purpose credit and debit card-present transactions from July 2015 to June 2016 involved an EMV chip card being read by an EMV-enabled point-of-sale terminal, up from 33% in the previous 12-month period. In the U.S., where the card networks’ POS EMV liability shifts took …