POS and Retail

MyBucks plans to give away entry-level smartphones, loaded with the company's financial technology, to encourage mobile payments, mobile banking and broader access to digital services in Africa, where financial innovation often moves quickly.

The mobile app's popularity was joined at the hip with Starbucks gift cards and loyalty points, a formula that has traditionally been known to work well at other retailers through plastic cards.

The changes are designed to remove the complex set of fees that could vary from one mercant to another.

Merchants are interested in new payments technology, but there's still an understanding gap that keeps cash a viable option.

Merchants that want to use technology to boost sales can establish in-house systems labs to test new payment technology and apps, or find an external lab to do so.

Since addresses are recorded in the blockchain, it is possible to trace each transaction where the address was used, which aids in AML, according to Ron Teicher, CEO of EverCompliant.

The deal could be harmful to their bottom line because it will provide Amazon with more visibility into an even wider percentage of their e-commerce data, writes Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap.

The cashierless Amazon Go store is barely more than an experiment — it's live in only one location in Seattle, with plans for a handful of stores to follow this year — but it has already sparked a race to put similar models in place.

While the 'buy button' is designed to benefit merchants, issuers and the card networks alike, merchants may not be willing to risk any tradeoff in their access to customer data.

There is a growing fraud problem encompassing much more than the direct value of lost merchandise. There is also manual order review, opportunity costs from false positives and the massive overhead of implementing fraud-fighting best practices, writes Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt.

Following the path paved by the checkout-free Amazon Go concept, the newly merged Albertsons and Rite Aid are developing their own technologies for faster and more efficient checkouts.

Innovations such as automated smart safes can make it easier to track the flow of paper money, reducing theft risk, and cut down on the number of armored truck pickups, according to Sam Bosch, president and CEO of Peregrin Financial Technologies.

Incumbent bank wires and checks, for example, carry slow settlement times and poor exchanges rates, while some newer fintech alternatives lack the interoperability with one another to scale and sometimes prioritize speed over security, writes Peter Shore, general manager of Transpay

The departure is likely to fuel speculation of a presidential run.

The City of London, in collaboration with iZettle, is introducing the world’s first contactless card payment scheme for street performers. And as PayPal completes its purchase of iZettle, it's likely that this technology will spread to the U.S.

For some, the fast pace of change in payments technology needs to slow down for consumers and merchants to catch up. For others, the technology must evolve because it is the consumer and merchant seeking change — all in the name of an easier, mobile experience.

Supermarkets and other retailers reported rejected transactions after a network glitch, causing some to quickly deploy cash-only checkouts.

Many of these attacks have been server side ransomware and other sophisticated hacks, leading companies to examine the immature security processes, the technology of application security, and the insufficient expertise of development, writes Jeannie Warner, the security manager at WhiteHat Security.

Retailers often try to counter Amazon's dominance by using the e-commerce giant's strengths against it, including its reliance on search engine optimization.

Virtual reality is seeing significant leaps in technology, with immediate applications to gaming and entertainment that foreshadow richer applications for VR in commerce.