Retailers

As owner of Whole Foods Market, Amazon is bringing one of its key strengths — swift product delivery — to its retail grocery store business.

Walmart Inc., pushing to challenge Amazon.com Inc. in e-commerce, has added more technology savvy to its board.

Employers have to find a way to keep associates productive and satisfied while this transition in payments experience is underway, writes Mike Zorn, vice president of Workplace Strategy at WorkJam.

"Ring-fencing" is designed to reduce risk, but will lead to major changes in transaction infrastructure and open a temporary door for fraudsters, according to Marcus Hughes, head of strategic business development at Bottomline Technologies.

Success with blockchain does not depend on new technology alone. It requires bringing together experts in people, process and technology to simplify complex processes and apply tested methods to the new technical landscape, writes Michael Goodman, senior director of data and analytics for NTT Data Services.

On-card biometrics is the final piece of the puzzle to bring trust and security to contactless payments without compromising convenience, writes Lina Andolf-Orup, global product marketing manager at Fingerprints.

Retailers used to be able to hold onto their physical presence as a differentiator against Amazon. In the past year, Amazon has taken even that advantage away.

Strong holiday spending was marked by active e-commerce spending, providing an impetus to invest in more digital payment technology.

The bank's commitment in the last couple of years to an "agile" environment of rapid testing and learning produced answers within a couple of months.

The announcement comes only a month after five other retailers dropped from Plenti. AT&T had dropped out of the program three months earlier as the first retailer to leave.

The card brand is navigating almost daily changes in the payments industry, resulting from company mergers and partnerships to advancing payments delivery and security.

The fintech revolution is now touching almost every market in the payments space. Some are still further ahead than others, so expect 2018 to be a year of consolidation in more mature sectors, but one of rapid change in those with some catching up to do, writes David Yohe, vice president of marketing at BillingTree.

That’s because transaction-based loyalty programs that focus on discounting simply train customers to wait for coupons and incentives, writes Tom Caporaso, CEO of Clarus Commerce.

Although some companies have started to integrate cross-channel marketing as a core element of their strategy, most still haven’t realized the opportunity at stake, writes Lisa Paccione, vice president of sales for Syniverse.

JPMorgan Chase and Amazon have demonstrated substantial power to digitize their industries, even influencing the strategy of others. But automating and streamlining health care will be a particularly tough task.

While there's lots of fintech innovation globally, some of the most exciting moves are coming from China, Japan and South Korea, writes John Mitchell, CEO of Episode Six.

As organizations look to AP to take on more strategic planning, budgeting, and cash management activities, they have to use automation to get rid of the manual, repetitive, non-value-added tasks they’re doing now, writes Brent Meyers, vice president of national sales for Nvoicepay.

Consumers are more than willing to share retail payment information, geolocations, as well as Uber, OpenTable, Facebook, and Twitter information. However, they have high expectations for what they receive in return, writes Lisa Woodley, vice president of FSI customer experience for NTT Data Services.

Starbucks has for some time been the poster child of mobile payments acceptance in the U.S., but even this success may be tapering off.

A crucial challenge for payment apps and cashless banking is how they adapt to provide services for the unbanked, writes Michael Kordvani, head of SEO for app development agency Fueled.