Bankers, fintech entrepreneurs, regulators and other financial services players gathered in New Orleans last week to discuss the future of the industry at SourceMedia's Digital Banking 2016 conference. Here are some of the highlights of the conference. For more, check out the hashtag #digibank16 on Twitter.

With the rise of global e-commerce, small and midsize companies are pressured to streamline the way they handle increasingly diverse types of payments.

Barclays Africa Group has a market penetration problem.

Big banks like Canada’s RBC, Capital One and Wells Fargo are pouring resources into proprietary NFC-based digital wallets to outflank third parties like Apple, Samsung and Android and regain top-of-wallet status.

Wells Fargo is joining other members of Early Warning's clearXchange network in providing real time person-to-person payments.

Visa has had a major sponsorship role at past summer Olympics, using the setting to test new technology. This type of "global lab experiment" lets the card brand view the four years between this major athletic event as a gauge for payments advancements.

Tradeshift has launched a payments and travel booking virtual assistant that uses voice recognition to manage ordering, payments and risk.

American Express is working with Facebook to explore different methods of customer engagement through the social media network’s Messenger app.

Facing more payments because of high-deductible insurance plans, 72% of consumers say they prefer to use electronic payment methods such as payment cards, Automated Clearing House or digital wallets to cover health care costs.

Battling a sea of technology companies and major incumbents like Western Union and Travelex for a share of the international payments and currency exchange pie may seem like an uphill climb for a smaller company with less of a track record.

The market for one-touch home supply-ordering services like Amazon Dash is heating up, and forecasters say it’s not just homes, but offices and organizations that could fuel growth, from a surge in “smart” buildings wired with devices to order items with the push of a button.

After saying it would not support Android Pay in the U.K, Barclays is leaning on device agnostic mobile technology and its own developers to launch its own payments app for the operating system.

Microsoft is in the process of rolling out a mobile wallet for its small share of the smartphone market. But the company has been steadily developing this technology across much bigger platforms.

The digital revolution has not been kind to independent sales organizations and others in the merchant acquiring market, which has seen its long-standing business model upended by the mobile point of sale and other new technologies.

Who is Microsoft Wallet for? With just 1.6% of the U.S. smartphone market as of January, it's unlikely that even Microsoft believes Windows Phone users are a huge untapped audience for mobile payments.

Bank of America is betting on consumers’ future intentions over their current actions when it comes to building its digital wallet strategy.

Four state-run banks in Thailand and 15 corporations will soon begin registering for PromptPay, formerly known as the AnyID scheme, a national payments platform that will allow users to send money with only their national ID or mobile phone number.

The term real-time payments is a slight misnomer. It focuses the industry and the market on the outcome instead of the input.

Facebook is poking its fingers into a lot of seemingly unrelated businesses, but commerce is always at the heart of its efforts. Here are some ways Facebook is building a new foundation for payments.

Many of the major mergers and acquisitions in the payments industry the past few years have had an underlying goal -- improve chances to make a splash in retail omnichannel payments.