AiFi uses artificial intelligence, sensors and cameras to outfit stores with a checkout-free system that can deploy without regard to the differences in store sizes.

Banks and cardholders will be able to verify purchases, increase credit limit, add cards immediately, provide feedback to retailers, receive on-demand coupons, or upgrade card benefits.

The Boston-based Circle has offered several services over the past few years and has shifted its strategy.

FitPay's wallet and digital payment platform, which will integrate with the tokenization platform, enables manufacturers of IoT and wearable devices to add contactless payment capabilities to their products.

Nearly a year after integrating with major mobile wallets, Punchh is expanding its cloud-based platform to integrate loyalty and payments for quick-service restaurants.

Even before PayPal and eBay split, their relationship wasn't perfect. PayPal may have seemed like a service that was destined to fuel sales for eBay in the early days of e-commerce, but even after the companies merged they found occasional reasons for conflict.

Retailers should also notice that each transaction with customers contains more than the currency, it contains the potential opportunity to establish a relationship, writes Franklin Chu, managing director of Azoya International.

Ant Financial, which operates China's popular Alipay wallet, has a plan for the U.S. that goes beyond its abandoned purchase of MoneyGram.

Wirecard has partnered with SES-imagotag, which makes electronic shelf-labeling systems, for a new technology enabling consumers to buy products directly from store shelves with their smartphones.

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.

Even in 2018, when mobile commerce and mobile point of sale are commonplace, fintechs are able to find plenty of niches stuck in the past.

The internet giant, SunTrust, Ally and other backers have invested $16 million in a new funding round for Greenlight Financial Technology, further blurring the lines between banks and tech companies.

Rambus has provided the data technology under the hood of Nintendo and PlayStation games since the 1990s, and later became a global token service provider. The next logical progression is mobile payments.

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.

A sophisticated campaign by Russian actors seeking to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election through social media included stealing the identities of Americans and using accounts at PayPal to aid their effort.

Four of the startups are focused on business and consumer bill payments, and a fifth offers student loan repayment assistance as an employee perk.

International officials are discovering they can sometimes avoid bank fees by replacing currency transfers with the technology at the heart of Bitcoin.

The Olympics draw together fans from around the globe to cheer on their fellow citizens, and having such a diverse group of people in one spot can inspire companies to experiment with cutting-edge technologies.

As much as payment companies love to talk about opening up their platforms, there's definite room for improvement.