Iot

Nearly all new payments technologies strive to become as ubiquitous — and as secure — as possible. It's a goal that is harder than ever to achieve.

Amazon.com Inc. reported a record-breaking holiday season as shoppers loaded their online baskets with items from Echo speakers to Calvin Klein clothes, suggesting consumer optimism isn’t being deterred by a tumbling stock market.

It can be difficult for security analysts to pinpoint the abnormal behavior while sorting through huge amounts of data, according to Steve Moore, chief security strategist at Exabeam.

Mobile banking, e-commerce integration, loyalty and rewards schemes and even IoT payments all link to cards. That’s a lot to ask of a back-end system, writes Rune Sorensen, a product manager at Nets.

Even as Amazon has expanded its cashierless Amazon Go stores to new cities, it has been careful to limit the size of each store as a concession to the limits of its technology. That constraint may soon be a thing of the past.

Banks are facing the potential of disruption by digital assistants from Apple, Amazon and Google — and are pouring money into machine learning to provide their own option for automating consumers' financial lives.

As the concept of smart cities — urban settings undergoing a digital transformation through "internet of things" technology and connected platforms — evolves, so too will the concept of making a payment.

Any future machine-to-machine environment calling for communication and transactions will surely include a consumer's option to make payments through such a network. That turns any home or business into its own complex network of devices, routers, sensors, passwords, communication coding and private credentials.

Blockchain may have received its most exposure as the distributed ledger technology at the foundation of cryptocurrency exchanges, but its use cases are advancing into other data-driven or supply-chain industries pursuing the Internet of Things.

Consumers are already overwhelmed with marketing messages. Here's how to break through.