Today's Headlines

WeChat Pay and Alipay mobile wallet companies add international credit card support

08/18/202308/17/2023 Stephanie Beck

The giants from China are now allowing overseas visitors to add foreign credit cards to their digital wallets. Overseas visitors to China are now able to link their international credit cards to a WeChat Pay or Alipay mobile wallet and use them to make purchases wherever those digital payment transactions are accepted. This means that Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and JCB cardholders can all use their cards in their phones. The Alipay and WeChat Pay mobile wallet permissions have now been updated, making it possible for international credit card users to…

Rakuten Group to combine its mobile payments and credit card business units

08/17/202308/16/2023 L. Green

Mobile payments Japan - person paying via mobile

The struggling Japanese company intends to fold together several of its units, according to recent announcements. Rakuten Group, headquartered in Japan, has announced its intentions to fold its mobile payments and points businesses into its credit card unit. This move could align the company to eventually list its card business as it has done with others. Even though Rakuten earns solid earnings from its e-commerce business, it has continually lost money over 12 straight quarters as a result of the expensive expansion of its mobile payments business, which didn’t gain…

How will mobile security be affected by widespread artificial intelligence use?

08/16/202308/15/2023 QR Code Press

Generative AI is becoming increasingly popular and will certainly lead to issues with misuse. ChatGPT, Bard, and other generative artificial intelligence tools are rapidly increasing in popularity worldwide, and experts are now bracing for the impact this will have on mobile security. Just as these tools help with productivity and efficiency, they can also pose a serious risk of misuse. Not long after generative AI tools were launched, they had already started to be used for mobile security threats such as malware, many of which have been worked into official…

Millennials love their mobile wallets while Boomers hesitate

08/15/202308/14/2023 Sam Lambert

Mobile wallets - Millennial holding wallet and phone

The use of digital transactions continues to rise, but user trends differ by generation. Consumers across all age groups are adopting the use of mobile wallets on an increasing basis, but some generations are following this trend much more enthusiastically than others. While some are using this technology quite readily, others are more hesitant to use regularly or at all. PYMNTS has release the results of their “The Mobile Wallet Challenge: Replacing Physical with Digital” study. The research was conducted in collaboration with ACI Worldwide. It involved surveying more than…

Mobile wallets see a decline in top-ups in some regions

08/14/202308/10/2023 Jennifer Goula

As popular as these digital payment methods have become, they are declining in the Bahamas. In the Bahamas, the use of mobile wallets has become commonplace, but over the first five months of the year, a declining trend was recorded in top-ups. The decline wasn’t a slight one, it was practically a freefall in the amount of money topped up. During the first five months of 2022, top ups to mobile wallets reached $38.4 million. During the same period in 2023, that figure reached only $7.1 million, a fraction of…