POS and Retail

The new optimism is fueled by rising standards of living, increases in smartphone usage and cheap data plans that are boosting internet penetration across the nation. Perhaps most important, India is the last big retail market still up for grabs, with an internet economy projected to double to $250 billion by 2020.

New Merchant Advisory Group chief John Drechny will push open standards for payments acceptance and security technology that doesn't impact customer experience.

Nedbank Money users can store payment card data in just one app for all the main South African scan-to-pay schemes, representing a combined footprint of over 100,000 retail points of presence and 800 billers.

There is space for banks to enter a market they largely ignore, according to William Phelan, president of PayNet.

The Lightning Connector eliminates the need for merchants using the Square Reader to rely on a 3.5mm headphone jack of a smartphone or tablet to operate with its mobile app.

Everything's in place for mobile payments to supplant plastic cards in the U.S. — except for a compelling reason for the transition.

Institutions must enhance their fraud prevention strategy, and the most effective and successful way for doing so is by empowering customers to detect and respond to suspicious activity before the funds ever leave their account, writes Deborah Peace, CEO of ACH Alert.

Google can’t underestimate the importance of its maiden voyage with Google Wallet and the lessons the company learned in being one of the first to offer payments through cellphones in the U.S.

After researchers exposed how hackable mobile point of sale systems are, vendors quickly shored up their defenses — while also blaming some vulnerabilities on payment methods they characterize as outdated.

The retailer-driven Merchant Customer Exchange initiative to create a common mobile wallet had good intentions, but it overlooked the nature of retail itself — that each company has to differentiate itself to lure customers.

Along with activating contactless payments at its store terminals, Costco has opened its checkout lines to Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay. But there’s a catch.

Bitcoin's scale and energy consumption have held it back as a payments option, but there are advancements that can change that, according to Jan-Willem Burgers, Europe technology lead with the distributed ledger practice at Capgemini.

Even as the payments landscape has become increasingly complicated and convoluted over the past several years, many industry players have not kept pace with their payments testing methods or tools, writes Steve Gilde, director of global product marketing for Paragon Application Systems.

Installing a modern payment gateway, for example, makes the checkout process more convenient, speeding up order processing while offering alternative payment methods, saved customer information and location-specific options, writes Amit Bhaiya, co-founder and CEO of DotcomWeavers.

With increasing value propositions, use of Apple Pay for in-store purchases should continue to increase, writes Mohammad Khan, president and co-founder of Omnyway.

Security researchers are uncovering widespread vulnerabilities in several popular mobile point-of-sale systems, which have become increasingly popular in recent years among many types of merchants large and small.

Consumers, who often understand little to anything about the fees retailers pay to accept cards, will not care about the details of the fight and will place their displeasure solely on the shoulders of any large retailer that elects this strategy, writes Myron Schwarcz, executive vice president of Strategic Resource Management.

In blockchain, a dispersed network of stakeholders takes over the previous owners of such services. These providers and users not only own but maintain the services that are powered by the blockchain. They also get to share the profits that are produced by the services, contends Donika Kraeva, communications manager at Dentacoin.

Proximity to the client is crucial. Only by understanding your client’s perspective on AI can you deliver a project that is truly worthwhile, writes Naomi Bowman, managing director at Berkeley Research Group.

Concern over Exobot is spreading beyond banking and across other sectors where customers regularly transact online, from e-commerce and retail to health care, writes Don Duncan, security engineer for NuData Security.