POS and Retail

Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to buy Dubai-based online retailer Souq.com, betting that e-commerce in the Middle East is poised to take off.

With AmazonFresh Pickup, a brick-and-mortar extension of its grocery delivery services, Amazon is edging further into the crowded grocery market with a model that downplays the process of wandering the aisles of a physical store. But unlike some of Amazon's other retail efforts, this one is not as big a departure as it first seems.

The business-to-business payments market is one of the laggards in transaction automation, and a reason often given is the lack of customization options. Businesses are using consumer-style technology for business purposes, and the fit isn't right.

Large merchants are re-energized in their conflict with Visa and Mastercard on the issue of swipe-fee costs, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to reinstate a class-action settlement that deeply divided many of the plaintiffs.

As trends in payments technology take hold or taper off, it's safe to say that one is firmly entrenched: The shift to mobile and integrated point of sale devices.

Amazon's Go concept store has caused concern among payment companies and retailers, though there are mobile-driven options that can replicate the experience.

Accenture has agreed to acquire First Annapolis Consulting in an effort to add payments expertise in several international markets.

ID attacks have expanded quickly in the past year, partly due to the same kind of automation that companies use to manage a high volume of transactions.

After its work with GPShopper produced favorable results the past two years, Synchrony Financial aims to dig deeper into mobile commerce by acquiring its partner.

Flipkart Online Services Pvt has completed a $1 billion fundraising and aims to raise as much as $1 billion more over the next few months, according to people familiar with the matter, giving India’s largest e-commerce company capital to battle back against rising competition.

The Plenti loyalty program unfolded two years ago with a new twist on plastic card-based rewards—a multi-merchant coalition in which participants were given exclusivity within their market and consumers could earn points at one retailer and redeem them at another.

The introduction of EMV is supposed to help reduce instances of fraud. But when a merchant has trouble operating its terminal, unscrupulous customers can take advantage.

As many tech companies push to counter the use of cash in favor of cards and mobile wallets, some merchants are pushing back by urging the use of cash.

The mobile point of sale vendor ShopKeep has purchased ChowBot, an online order-and-pay software tool for restaurants, with plans to broadly integrate the new feature into its services for small businesses.

Square Inc. has just scored its oldest customer ever — a 1,200-year-old Buddhist temple in central Japan.

Chase Pay is the result of years of investment in ChaseNet, a closed-loop system that allows JPMorgan Chase to cut costs in a way few other banks could. So what value — if any — does Chase get from buying the discarded remains of the MCX merchants' mobile wallet?

The technology from MCX's CurrentC wallet, which never formally launched, will get new life with Chase Pay, which debuted in 2016 with Starbucks, Best Buy and commitments from MCX members such as Walmart.

The traditonal method of scoring merchants based on risk may not work when the attack uses low risk merchants to hide illegal transactions.

The steady march of smartphone technology makes mobile wallet adoption seem inevitable, but consumers still need convincing.

The Most Influential Women in Payments are the ones taking risks with new ideas and investments, and developing the technology that will forever change the way people handle money. Not only do they set an example for their peers, they are unafraid to learn from newcomers and are diligent about encouraging a freshness and diversity of ideas.