David Heun

The spread of Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Samsung's Bixby is changing the way consumers interact with technology. Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence is doing more than ever to handle and protect payments.

Over the years, Square has evolved from a supplier of simple card readers to a provider of diverse omnichannel services. But the consumer market has always eluded it.

Many companies in the payments realm want to be seen as the next Uber, but Uber's Asian counterpart Grab is working to become something else — the next Octopus.

For much of the last decade, credit card companies and issuers have fine-tuned security to the point where if any suspicious activity occurs on a cardholder account, that cardholder will receive an alert. That same sort of transaction and behavioral analytics is starting to come into other business sectors and walks of life.

The card is Starbucks' first product with Chase since the companies agreed early in 2016 to make Chase Pay part of the Starbucks app when it became available.

Apple's digital services group, which includes Apple Pay, generated $8.5 billion in revenue in the quarter for Apple, a jump of 34% from the previous year.

Neural network systems — which try to emulate the human brain — will become increasingly important as the stolen identities from the recent Equifax breach and others start surfacing in the coming years on fraudulent payment card or loan applications.

Telcos have long hoped to play a key role in mobile payments, and the mobile-only Orange Bank is a major push toward that goal.

American Express will launch its next generation of online authentication system, SafeKey 2.0, early next year with support for biometrics technology and mobile commerce.

Canadian consumers using Samsung Pay can now make Interac debit payments through their mobile devices using a tokenization service from Interac and digital security provider Rambus Inc.

American Express will become the exclusive issuer of Hilton Honors cobranded credit cards in January, taking over the entire portfolio it previously shared with Citigroup.

EMVCo has established a new specification for updated 3-D Secure e-commerce fraud prevention that will be the basis by which the EMV standards body will test the new protocol for security compliance.

Payments technology changes rapidly, and cybercriminal techniques have no trouble keeping pace. Against that backdrop, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council must set new rules without hindering development.

The gig economy is one of the most demanding business sectors in terms of technology, speed and security. All of these factors play into how these companies handle payments.

It's been nearly six years in the making, but TableSafe has the EMV certification it has long needed to make its pay-at-the-table Rail platform a future-proof option for restaurants.

Deserve wants to deliver credit cards to students and underbanked young adults through a system that underwrites credit without relying on FICO scores and instead by judging the applicants on their future potential.

Any bank using IBM for managing transactions and funneling payment processing onto a single platform will now have access and support for the Zelle person-to-person payment service.

PayPal is strengthening its services for e-commerce marketplaces and crowdfunding money-raising projects through PayPal for Marketplaces, while also adding Pay with Google for its Braintree merchants accepting Android Pay.

The Clearing House has become one of the first Mastercard-certified, third-party token service providers on behalf of issuing banks.

In recent years, there's been a lot of activity in payments M&A, but a few deals stand out — some for their size, and others for their ability to transform both parties in a fundamental way.