Mobile point-of-sale

Within sports venues, providers want to handle payments and integrate loyalty and other services through every facet of the ballpark and teams operating those facilities.

Many technology developers yearn to invent the future of payments through software, but Toast is also reaching to the past by trying to perfect the hardware that surrounds the new digital tools.

It's an important pivot point for the industry — consumer trust is threatened by a steady flow of data breaches, and consumers are divided on whether they want to stick with plastic or move on to mobile and wearable payments.

Square has come a long way since it debuted in 2009 with a simple plastic card reader for micro-merchants. But it didn't make its journey alone.

Square's deal to buy Weebly, a San Francisco-based web design company, is a major weapon in its growing arsenal.

Bluestone Lane, an Australian-style café and coffee shop chain in the U.S., has been well-served by its move to cashless payments in October 2016. But even the most well-planned transition can encounter problems if customers aren't expecting it.

Walmart has also used Sam's Club's Scan & Go fast checkout feature and even robots in an attempt to shorten queues and improve the payment experience.

Mobile payments provider iZettle is adding an e-commerce platform that will expand merchants' capabilities to accept payments in-store and online.

LevelUp had a lot of failed experiments along the way, but it still won over major partners and is seeing new results in the restaurant industry.

The $3.4 billion deal to take Verifone private is more than just an effort to strengthen the company. It's also a signal of how much the market has changed from the days when Verifone found itself scrambling to combat a newcomer called Square.