Merchant

Hot on the heels of the January debut of the first Amazon Go store in Seattle, the e-tailer is reportedly planning to open six more stores over the course of 2018. It's a surprising show of confidence from Amazon.

Amazon Go has swung far to the side of self-service as the company has maximized on technology and eliminated the value of face-to-face interactions. This is not be a recipe for success for every retailer, writes Jon Croy, co-founder and CMO of Point Inside.

By failing to protect their customers’ data, financial institutions and others in the payments ecosystem are risking trust, the most important currency they have, writes David Barnhardt, executive vice president of product at GIACT.

A community group has secured a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to probe banks’ small-business lending practices. It follows a 2017 pilot study in which the group found that white shoppers posing as business owners were three times more likely to be invited for follow-up appointments than their black counterparts and twice as likely to be offered help in completing loan applications.

By investing in next generation strategies and shifting their mindsets about testing, organizations can better safeguard and control the payments process, providing a more reliable customer experience and better protecting one of their most important assets—their reputations, writes Steve Gilde, a director at Paragon Application Systems.

AI technologies can satisfy the growing demand for real-time, self-service experiences in a variety of ways, from supporting more voice-enabled payments and transactions to automating complex decision making and product recommendations, writes Marc West, chief technology officer at Fiserv.

The rudimentary email pre-orders at Grossman's stores were helpful, but limiting in that it still focused on a one-on-one interaction with the customer. Grossman has since implemented technology that allows multiple customers to submit a single order.

Amazon will need to synchronize information collected across weight sensors, GPS, payments systems and surveillance to ensure critical data efficiently flows between the necessary systems with minimal latency, writes Keith McAuliffe, general manager for the financial services sector at Solace.

A bipartisan bill to establish a federal security framework follows a string of efforts beset by congressional turf battles.

The card activation process is relatively low-tech, but since its introduction nearly three decades ago it has been hugely effective in preventing credit cards from falling into the wrong hands. Among its pioneers was Ash Gupta, American Express’ president of global credit risk, who is retiring next month.