Mobile order, delivery and payment apps are proliferating at restaurants, but they're also becoming less distinguishable, posing an entirely new challenge as deep discounts become the weapon of choice.

Brazilian payments provider Ebanx is working with Alibaba Group to test a retail store that combines physical and virtual showcases to allow consumers to obtain Chinese technology products.

Researching how pain points make consumers work harder can fix payment execution, says UJET's Anand Janefalkar.

SumUp, a U.K.-based mobile point of sale company, needed a way to differentiate itself from larger rivals such as PayPal, Square and iZettle. Its solution is to offer faster settlement, in partnership with Starling Bank.

Collections professionals are often overlooked because they are forced into a reactive and uncomfortable role. In reality, collections teams are very similar to the much more lauded sales team, says Billtrust's Derek Bluestone.

Starbucks’ latest innovation doesn’t include camera-driven invisible checkout and doesn’t even come from Seattle. But for rank and file retailers, it may prove even more informative than watching the progress of Amazon Go.

High-tech heavyweights like Google, Amazon and Apple have tied payments to broader financial services, added to the view that banks are less relevant, writes Polyient Labs' Brad Robertson.

The world’s biggest restaurant company is buying startup Apprente Inc., a developer of voice-recognition technology for use in the restaurant industry, to help speed up lines. The idea is to eventually have a machine, instead of a person, on the other side of the intercom to relay orders to kitchen staff.

The large payment processor mergers were meant to give bigger companies a better way to compete against the nimble startups that were luring their customers away for digital services such as mobile point of sale. And post-merger, Fiserv and First Data have fired their first salvo.

Enterprise payments remain a complex litany of disparate processes burdened by fraud, labor and errors, says Troovo's Kurt Knackstedt.