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Apple has its credit card, Verizon just got one, now Samsung wants to put another on the table. The Korean company has announced a partnership with U.K.-based fintech firm Curve and Mastercard to launch the Samsung Pay Card later this year.
Earlier this year, Verizon announced plans to offer its own credit card, joining the likes of Apple, Amazon, and PayPal with a company-branded card — even other carriers like T-Mobile have gotten in on the action. Now the Verizon Visa Card is finally set to debut on June 26, bringing lots of savings and benefits to new and existing Verizon customers.For starters, the credit card (issued through a partnership with Synchrony Bank) works like any other — you can pay at terminals that accept Visa, shop online, and earn rewards back for daily transactions. Verizon's long had an Auto Pay discount of up to $10 on various plans when paid with a debit card or bank account, and now the Verizon Visa Card becomes the first credit card that offer's extended to. Verizon promises no caps on the amount of rewards you get from purchases, no expiration dates, no annual fees, and no foreign transaction fees.So what's the catch? Well, while you do earn "cash-back" rewards, those are actually in Verizon Dollars, usable only at Verizon. Shoppers can earn Verizon Dollars at a rate of 4% on gas and grocery store purchases, 3% on dining, 2% on Verizon offerings, and 1% on everything else. The Verizon Dollars that you accumulate can only be spent on things like Verizon service, phones, and accessories.
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Whether you're browsing different sites or buying something online, you likely rely on an autofill system to enter your usernames, passwords, addresses, and payment details so you don't have to manually type that data every time. Google already offers this in Chrome, but the interface is changing and adopting a more modern look that's anchored to your keyboard.
Google Pay has some great functionality on its own, allowing you to import credit cards and related information, but it lacks native support for pkpass files, a file type used for things like passes in Apple Wallet. The app Pass2Pay solves that problem, allowing users to import pkpass files into Google Pay in a snap.
People who feel strongly about their purchasing habits might consider a custom design for a credit card to be an extension of their personality — talk to Darrell Kennedy who got "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" "Everybody Hates Chris" star Terry Crews's approval via tweet to splash Terry Jeffords's Julius Rock's likeness on her plastic. For the tap-and-go people who like to use their phones, Google Pay has had the capacity to support custom card designs for at least the past year. Now, as far as we know, we're seeing the first major bank to take on some unique card art for its mobile payment customers.
It's been a busy year so far for Google's payment platforms, especially since Android Pay, Google Wallet, and Chrome's payment autofill feature were unified under new Google Pay branding. Previous Android Pay functionality is unchanged in the app, which allows you to add payment options from a wide range of banks and credit unions.
Mobile banking is great. You can deposit checks and move money around, all without having to go to a physical bank location. Chase is now adding even more features to its app, including the ability to request new cards when they're lost or stolen and to prevent card blocks when you travel.
Generally speaking, a skimmer is a small device used to steal credit/debit card information. Thieves will place them on top of card insertion slots on unwatched payment terminals (example), like those on gas station pumps and outdoor ATMs. When you insert your card, the card passes through the skimmer, which captures the magnetic strip data. Later, the thief will return and collect the recorded data, sometimes allowing them to make purchases using the stolen card information.
A few years ago, a couple companies had the idea of creating credit cards with e-ink screens that could replace all the other credit cards in your pocket. You may remember them as Coin and Plastc. The former, after missing its target date by a year, hit the market in 2015. The latter is still in development. Since quite a bit of time has passed since the end of 2014, Plastc is now issuing a status update.
A mobile payment service is only useful if you can, you know, use it... which must be pretty disheartening for customers of smaller banks and credit unions. Each one of them needs to be certified with new payment systems before their customers can join in the "fun" of paying for stuff with their phones. Today Samsung Pay, the semi-proprietary system that's surprisingly interoperable thanks to some neat payment tech, adds a whopping 19 new Visa and MasterCard issuers to its list of compatible banks and similar companies.
If you've been waiting patiently for your top-of-the-line Google flagship phone to arrive, you won't have to wait too much longer. If you haven't been waiting patiently, you probably don't have long to wait either, but you should really be more gracious about it. We've been sent reports from multiple Android Police readers saying that their credit cards have been charged after ordering the Nexus 6P on the Play Store, which typically means that they'll be shipped very soon. At this point, all of them are in the United States.
Amazon's Android app has received an update to 5.1 that's all about reducing how much typing you need to do to use the app. We've spotted changes to the search UI that make it possible to perform inquiries using your voice. We've also come across strings hinting that credit card scanning is either already included or on its way.
Nearly a year ago, this company called Coin came to the Internet with a product, also called Coin, that it promised would store all of your credit, debit, and loyalty cards inside of a single nifty replacement. People could pre-order this Bluetooth-connected card for $50, and they were told they would receive it by summer of 2014, otherwise known as the season that just ended. Where are their cards? Well, they're still available for pre-order, and orders placed now aren't expected to arrive until the summer of 2015.
People are after your credit card information. Okay, this isn't a cable news report, so I'll dial it back a bit. Sometimes bad things happen when credit cards fall into the wrong hands, whether that's from physical theft or large-scale cyber crime. There's been a number of incidents in the news of late, so companies are doing what they can to provide their customers with peace of mind. So MasterCard has released a new MasterCard In Control app that monitors your credit card activity and notifies you if it detects anything suspicious.
PayPal's Here direct sale and money transfer service is an admirable rival to the similar Square, and before today its standard Android app was perfectly fine. But you can't deny that it looked a little... iPhoney. Thankfully the second release of the PayPal Here app brings the user interface more in line with other polished Android apps, and throws a little expanded functionality in for good measure.
As a tech addict who lives in a remote area, Amazon Prime is a godsend for me: getting stuff delivered to my door quickly when it would otherwise necessitate a three hour round trip is well worth the nominal fee. Amazon hopes you'll agree, and to that end they've now included the ability to sign up for an Amazon Prime free trial right in the official Amazon app.
If you sell wares or services on a one-to-one basis, you know that Square is a godsend for credit card point of sale. While the original Android app didn't have any real issues, the newly-updated version is even better, applying a cleaner and more readable UI and a handful of new features. Most importantly, it works with the newest version of Square's headphone jack card reader.
We were ridiculously excited by the prospect of a physical Google Wallet card when we reported on it just over a year ago, but six months went by without a peep until eventually the project was canned. Thankfully, awesome ideas don't disappear just because one company decides it's not ready to make them happen. Coin, a startup out of San Francisco, has announced a card of its own that promises to deliver much of what we were excited to see Google pull off themselves.
PSA: Google Puts Brakes On Wallet Promotion For Credit Card-Funded Transfers
Google's Wallet-powered peer-to-peer payment service launched to rival Paypal was announced on May 15th and came with an interesting promotion: waived
Google's Wallet-powered peer-to-peer payment service launched to rival Paypal was announced on May 15th and came with an interesting promotion: waived fees for transfers funded by credit cards. This promotion was recently (possibly today) adjusted quite drastically, and now only payments less than $250 aren't charged fees. Additionally, we now know that the promotional period ends on June 29th.