Retailers

With customers now having the opportunity to onboard across multiple devices and channels, or even through a call center, the likelihood of an inconsistent experience is drastically increased, Neal Keene of Intelledox says.

American shoppers were quick off their marks early in the holiday-shopping season as retailers rang up the best sales increase since 2013, led by online purchases, according to a BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research report.

Those yard-long paper receipts that spew from cash registers may be following plastic bags and foie gras into the dustbin of New York City history.

With customers now having the opportunity to onboard across multiple devices and channels, or even through a call center, the likelihood of an inconsistent experience is drastically increased, says Intelledox's Neal Keene.

As merchants and fraud prevention specialists develop new strategies for fighting fraud, organized criminals find new vulnerabilities to exploit, a trend that shows no sign of letting up, says ClearSale's Rafael Lourenco.

In the race to make shopping as easy as possible, a growing group of companies has turned to a strategy that seems impossible in our security-saturated world: the honor system.

Paytm and Walmart are each offering credit in India to obtain a competitive advantage in an environment that's typically more welcoming than that of China.

Adoption of contactless is already well under way, and in a few years consumers will likely look back and recall the bad old days when valuable time was taken up waiting for transactions be processed and wonder how they ever coped without the speed, ease and convenience of contactless payment cards, writes Fiserv's Jamie Topolski.

While manual fraud prevention may be manageable at first, as the number of payment types and channels increase, it can rapidly become untenable, says The ai Corporation's Mark Goldspink.

While we expect growing consumer demand for biometrics, we also expect to see payments industry players move toward these types of future-proof technologies and away from legacy password-type systems, says Nuance Communications' Simon Marchand.