Technology

Enticements such as rewards, loyalty points and coupons seldom face pushback as a marketing concept, but there's been recent concern that these programs are devouring potential revenue from consumers who would be willing to pay full price.

Not long ago, self-checkout lanes were seen as an encroachment on traditional retail sales, depriving shoppers of the personal touch that comes with interacting with a cashier. Today, this model is under attack from mobile devices, which are both more high-tech and more personal.

Indonesian online payments company KinerjaPay has opened a gift card center enabling consumers to purchase gift cards with bitcoin from major U.S. merchants including Amazon, Starbucks and Barnes & Noble.

Customers can ask Amazon’s virtual assistant about account balances, spending habits and financial questions that they may be too embarrassed to ask a human.

Toronto-based Glance Technologies has introduced a new version of its Glance Pay mobile payments app that uses micro-location sensing technologies along with image recognition, an approach it says is easier for merchants to adopt than QR codes.

In recent years, companies have aggressively reinvented the card-reading dongle to fit their brands and absorb new technologies like EMV and NFC. But few have succeeded in doing away with the dongle entirely.

As a large furniture retailer in South Florida, City Furniture had to decide whether to move quickly to upgrade terminals and avoid the October 2015 EMV chip card liability shift, or stay on track with a process it was already engaged in for a mobile point of sale system in its showrooms.

The regulatory agency is expected to start asking for public feedback on changing the rule on proprietary trading by banks; bitcoin offshoot is worth about a tenth of the original.

Plenty of U.S. merchants still working to complete their migration to EMV now have another high-pressure technology hurdle to worry about: Most are still using a core transaction security protocol set to expire in the next 11 months and if they don’t take appropriate action they’ll be unable to process transactions.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit and blogs create environments where like-minded users can connect, share opinions and cultivate a sense of camaraderie, creating an unprecedented number of distinct nano-segments, writes Steve Gilde, director of global payments for Paragon.