POS and Retail

In a bid to help small businesses whose transaction volumes don’t warrant acquiring a dedicated POS terminal, National Australia Bank is partnering with Visa and Quest Payment Systems to pilot a tap-on-phone solution that provides secure contactless card acceptance using the business owner’s smartphone.

Managing compliance and breach risk make it harder to offer a good customer experience, but the cost of friction may be even higher, argues Bob Janacek, CEO of DataMotion.

Investors are making bets on checkout-free retail, a category that is just as challenging as it is innovative. But it's payment technology's race to the moon, a chance to seize a favorable position in the struggle to save retail.

Walmart has filed a patent application for a digital currency that, like Facebook's Libra, would be a stablecoin backed by traditional currencies. And it envisions a very specific use case where its coin could stand in for cash — or even for a bank account.

Square has worked hard in the past several years to offer more than just mobile card acceptance, but not all of its efforts have paid off.

Younger consumers still like to go to the mall. Keeping them there requires a mix of easy payments, financing and shopping in multiple channels, says Nufar Segal, general manager of consumer financing for at Jifiti.

Most cloud storage systems have gaps that open the door to account takeover, API attacks and other threats, argues Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO of CipherCloud.

Square Inc. is selling its Caviar food-delivery app to DoorDash Inc. for $410 million, as the money-losing payments company searches for profits.

Standardizing charge backs would make management easier, and merchants would only have to understand one set of protocols, which could also standardize responses, says Monica Eaton-Cardone, COO of Chargebacks 911 and CIO of its parent company Global Risk Technologies.

Amex's multi-merchant rewards coalition, Plenti, may have failed, but ExxonMobil never gave up on the program's potential.

The Fed's involvement will inject competition into the market and offer merchants choice as they weigh their payments acceptance options, argues John Drechny, CEO of the Merchant Advisory Group.

Long overshadowed by food delivery startups such as Uber Eats and on-demand delivery service players such as Postmates, delivering fuel to a consumer’s vehicle is a convenience service that is growing in the U.S. and other markets.

While traditional payment processors conquered bitcoin in the first battle, the disruptive potential of blockchain technology remains a potent threat and incumbent payment processors should prepare for a healthy new challenge.

The time is ripe to move decision-making up the ladder and for organizations to bite the bullet by creating a more inclusive comprehensive strategy for the overall business that considers all the disparate security needs, writes Madeline Aufseeser, an analyst and fintech executive.

As checkout-free stores dramatically reduce — or even eliminate — the need for point-of-sale devices, terminal makers are turning their focus to multichannel services that can keep younger, digital-savvy customers coming into stores.

Banks and fintechs such as payment apps depend on one another a lot more than their marketing messaging would lead you believe. The question is no longer whether they can partner, but how they can work together to optimize those synergies for one another, writes Flywire's Mike Massaro.

By offering Prime subscribers one-day shipping instead of the standard two, Amazon saw a dramatic change in shopping behavior — and a corresponding rise in costs.

The mobile point of sale market has grown far beyond its roots as an off-the-shelf dongle for smartphones. The category is now driving major acquisitions, collaborations and international deployments.

In their efforts to understand data privacy regulations and maintain compliance, it’s become clear that a large number of retailers simply don’t know the true whereabouts of their customers’ data, never mind how that data is being used, says Cleo's Dave Brunswick.

Giant Eagle’s supermarkets go back a century, literally, making the Pittsburgh chain one of the best tests yet for how the supermarket experience can adapt to mobile technology and the de-emphasizing of traditional checkout.