Mobile Wallets

Banks have closed thousands of branches in recent years, hitting rural America especially hard and leaving retail ATMs, prepaid cards, and services from non-bank providers to fill the void, according to a new Federal Reserve report. The “Perspectives from Main Street: Bank Branch Access in Rural Communities” report released Monday …

Installment-payments provider Klarna said it added 60,000 merchants to its network in 2019. More than 190,000 merchants offer Klarna as a payment option now. The number of monthly U.S. active users of the Klarna app, which enables them to shop with any store or brand online, increased almost 160% from July through September.Core-banking …

The major payment card networks have long since come to terms with PayPal Holdings Inc., and now they’re finding ways to put that newfound friendship to use in burnishing their brands with cardholders. The latest example surfaced Monday with an announcement from Discover Financial Services that Discover cardholders can use …

PayPal Holdings Inc. is betting big on its strategy of boosting its e-commerce presence with its approximately $4 billion acquisition of Honey Science Corp., a technology platform that helps consumers find offers and deals on popular e-commerce sites. Announced Wednesday afternoon, the deal envisions Honey tapping into the more than …

Observers of mobile wallets have focused attention on user counts as a sign of adoption, but that leaves open the question of how many of these consumers are turning into habitual users. As it turns out, mobile-payments apps have a much harder time retaining users than do banking apps, according …

Confirming rumors that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into issues involving debit card transaction routing, Visa Inc. late last week reported the Federal Trade Commission has asked it to voluntarily provide information about its routing practices. In a brief notice in its fiscal 2019 report to the Securities and …

Ever since Apple Pay debuted in 2014, Apple Inc. has kept the near-field communication chip in its devices off-limits to payment apps from other companies. But now legislation has appeared in Germany that may force the computing giant to grant access to that all-important chip, which allows Apple phones and …

Now that Google Inc. is making a play for the heart of payments—the checking account—some observers see the strategy’s first fruit as likely to be a move into a massive market long controlled by banks and service providers. “It’s huge,” Krista Tedder, director of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, …

With Facebook Inc.’s launch Tuesday of Facebook Pay, the social-media giant may feel somewhat assured that many of its 1.6 billion daily users will at least try the new wallet when making purchases in one of the company’s social networks. But that does not mean the rest of the payments …

Research firm eMarketer Inc. forecasted that 2019 U.S. holiday sales will surpass $1 trillion in value for the first time. Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, is expected to be the biggest online shopping day and could approach $10 billion in sales. With Thanksgiving falling on the last Thursday of …