A Perfect Payments Pair? Plus, What Consumers Want

Here are our top five tweets from the week that was. Keep tweeting, and we may feature you next Friday.

@mondatoportal: The money keeps rolling in for payment start-ups: http://bit.ly/KAVjT4 via @PYMNTS ”ª#mobilepayments”¬

Seriously: $27 million for a startup that monitors your company’s presence on review sites like Yelp; $38 million for an e-commerce platform in Russia; $30 million for a company that develops iPad-based shopping applications for within the brick-and-mortar store. If you’ve got an idea for a payment company, it seems like now is the perfect time to pitch it to an investor or two.

See the original tweet here

@MasterCardNews: The Digital Wallet’s Future is Now: http://bit.ly/MDN8XL (via @TheStreet) ”ª#CashlessConvo”¬ ”ª#FuturePay”¬ ”ª#PayPass”¬ ”ª#MobilePayments”¬

Every single day, there’s more to report on the digital wallet front. Now The Street’s Chris Ciaccia has noticed, and says the feeling that things are changing is backed up by the data: Ernst & Young recently estimated that mobile payments would grow to $245 billion by 2014.

See the original tweet here

@MobLinz: @pymnts We know!

This one’s hard to understand without context: the folks at MobLinz were agreeing with our tweet that said emerging market consumers are being underserved by banks. Specifically, consumers in regions like the Middle East and Southeast Asia want more mobile and online banking service — while just a quarter of Middle Eastern banks, and two-thirds of banks in Southeast Asia, provide mobile banking platforms.

See the original tweet here

@SpendTrend: Will healthy credit usage during first fifteen days of June mean higher ”ª#retail”¬ ”ª#sales”¬ for full-month? Find out, follow ”ª#SpendTrend”¬. ^KU

We’d certainly like to know the answer to this question — which is why we’ll be following First Data’s SpendTrend series of research papers much more closely in the coming months. We recommend you do the same.

See the original tweet here

@bobegan: wallaby and icache need to marry. “@pymnts: Startup Puts Your Entire ”ª#Wallet”¬ On One Card, Then Optimizes ”ª#Rewards”¬ http://ow.ly/bRcXu ”

Last but not least, the marriage proposal: there’s no denying Wallaby’s new cloud-powered payment card feels like a similar solution to the mobile wallet being built at iCache. If you’re not familiar with either new device, get more information here and here.

See the original tweet here

Happy tweeting, loyal readers.