POS and Retail

Researching how pain points make consumers work harder can fix payment execution, says UJET's Anand Janefalkar.

SumUp, a U.K.-based mobile point of sale company, needed a way to differentiate itself from larger rivals such as PayPal, Square and iZettle. Its solution is to offer faster settlement, in partnership with Starling Bank.

Starbucks’ latest innovation doesn’t include camera-driven invisible checkout and doesn’t even come from Seattle. But for rank and file retailers, it may prove even more informative than watching the progress of Amazon Go.

The world’s biggest restaurant company is buying startup Apprente Inc., a developer of voice-recognition technology for use in the restaurant industry, to help speed up lines. The idea is to eventually have a machine, instead of a person, on the other side of the intercom to relay orders to kitchen staff.

The large payment processor mergers were meant to give bigger companies a better way to compete against the nimble startups that were luring their customers away for digital services such as mobile point of sale. And post-merger, Fiserv and First Data have fired their first salvo.

AiFi has partnered two global powerhouses in banking and groceries to pilot an Amazon Go-like convenience store in the Netherlands.

Mobile payments speed and convenience is more than an abstraction, and needs to be quantified, says UJET's Anand Janefalkar.

There's been a significant lag in how financial institutions serve commercial clients with mobile technology, and that creates an opportunity for credit unions.

They’ve scrapped the newspapers and beefed up the food, but most Starbucks cafes in the U.S. don’t look all that different today than they did a decade ago. That’s about to change.

As bans on sports betting ease in more states, payment processors are counting on new revenue streams, particularly as the NFL season gets underway.

Amazon is reportedly testing technology that allows contactless payments via a hand gesture, applying technology that would provide valuable insight to fuel other initiatives such as Amazon Go.

Legacy retailers are starting to get serious about checkout-free technology, bringing new insights into the challenges inherent in replacing decades-old traditional checkout layouts at stores.

If the retail giants' Merchant Customer Exchange payments venture collapsed under the weight of trying to create a one-size-fits-all mobile wallet to bypass card networks, then the implosion of that joint venture was the best thing that could have happened.

It's unclear whether the Trump administration can or will declare a national emergency as part of the trade dispute between the U.S. and China, but the discourse alone could disrupt major business relationships that involve American retailers, payment companies and Chinese firms.

Amid success stories like Apple Pay, Google Pay and the Starbucks app, there are many wallet apps that failed to gain traction — or squandered it when they did. But there is a lot to learn from their experiences.

If firms don't enroll consumers quickly for card accounts, it suggests other elements of the institution may also be suspect, says Kofax's Dermot McCauley.

In the age of e-commerce and the "Pays," redemptions will no longer be viewed primarily as an expense to be managed, but rather as a tool to create value through higher spending, brand engagement, and long-term loyalty, says Capco's Daniela Hawkins.

Digital incentive marketing, gift cards and loyalty points creates more information to attract crooks, says PerimiterX's Omri Lluz.

Square's working to boost its appeal to third-party developers, especially as a growing number of competitors and broader economic challenges loom on the horizon.

Checkout-free technology is very limited in availability and very much a work in progress, but developers and investors are relying on its promise to accelerate payments' broader evolution from streamlining execution to determining intent.