Merchant

Until now, Amazon's moves seemed like cautious pokes at the deeply ingrained habit of going to a store and paying with a plastic card. Furthermore, any competitors may have seen Amazon's lacking retail store presence as a buffer that kept them at least temporarily safe from the same fate that befell the bookselling world. How naive they were.

Amazon is working aggressively to change the way people shop — especially in the grocery space — but not all of its activities focus on products and store design. The e-commerce giant has also influenced a lot about how people use their payment cards.

Amazon has been making some aggressive moves in the grocery industry in recent months, but perhaps none so aggressive as its just-announced deal to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.

Younger consumers spend much of their time on messaging platforms, creating a risk for retailers that are not active in the channel.

Amazon’s new Prime rewards program is the latest way the tech titan is cultivating a loyal use base. To retain and engage customers, banks should follow Amazon’s lead and layer in more value-added services.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication plans to add instant payments messaging for the European market by late 2018, marking another step in its ongoing faster payments projects.

A deeper dive into the workings of the Amazon Prime Reload program should give the card payments industry serious cause for concern.

Consumers don't want to feel disconnected from retailers in e-commerce, and don't want a complicated checkout experience, writes Jason Fordham, vice president of product at SmarterHQ.

The task at hand for retail app developers is increasingly clear: Make it as easy as possible for consumers to pay through a mobile device.

The New York firm, which offers high-cost credit to small businesses, has attributed its recent struggles to certain loans performing worse than had been expected.