Retailers

Target Corp. agreed to purchase grocery-delivery startup Shipt Inc. for $550 million, stepping up efforts to challenge Amazon.com Inc. in e-commerce orders.

Financial services organizations increasingly need an unwavering commitment to customer experience in order to compete, or the competitor down the street will do it first, writes Chris Millner, a principal of financial technology and a payments consultant at North Highland.

Kroger Co., the largest U.S. supermarket chain, will begin offering JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Pay mobile wallet in certain markets beginning next year.

While much has been said about the "total supply" of bitcoin as a fixed amount, the reality is that "hard forks" in the Bitcoin blockchain have eliminated this limit, writes Mariam Nishanian, a spokesperson for Dentacoin.

For merchants, a processor that’s a tad better, a bit more comprehensive, can make an enormous difference, writes Eric Grover, a principal at Intrepid Ventures.

The risks of fraud, along with the current reputation of such currencies as often being used for money laundering and other criminal activities, has caused worry in the market, writes John Verver, and advisor to ACL.

We’ll view this wild rally as the starting point of cryptocurrencies becoming mainstream. They cannot be defined as a fad any longer, writes Nigel Green, founder and CEO of deVere Group.

The concept is designed to free up workers to produce food and serve customers instead of handling payments.

The best course of action is to not focus advocacy efforts on the CFPB; rather, focus efforts on those members of Congress who support small business, deregulation and free enterprise, writes Rozanne Anderson, vice president and chief compliance officer for Ontario Systems.

Almost 10,000 merchants in Hong Kong and Macau will offer discounts throughout December to Alipay users from Mainland China. Merchants in India, Thailand, and other markets will also participate.

Establishing trust, especially when it comes to online payments, is critical. People need to feel secure and confident that their personal boundaries won’t be crossed or their information misused, writes Rik van't Hof, director of product management front-end for Ingenico e-commerce.

Card usage drops off fast after a false positive. In many cases, two false positives cause consumers to abandon a card permanently.

Discover's shift starts in April 2018. Mastercard has also eliminated signatures for credit and debit card transactions.

Airlink's knowledge of the local market and relationships with banks, acquirers and large merchants in region will help the Paris-based Ingenico grow in Taiwan and strengthen its position in Northeast Asia.

The incentive marks a new direction for card-linked offers, which have become a staple for many banks that offer the deals through third-party services like Cardlytics.

The free pass becomes effective when a flight is expected to be delayed by two or more hours and the cardholder has registered flight details at least six hours prior to scheduled departure.

It's part of Visa's strategy of using the Olympics to showcase innovation, a move that in the upcoming Olympics will also include wearable payments.

Even the efficiencies of an upgrade may not be enough for the human touch that some higher-risk accounts require, leaving a "painful" process for merchants and acquirers.

Recent data breach events in September 2017 in the U.S., involving the stock value drop of Sonic as well as Equifax, are evidence of the negative impact of data breaches on the economic value of businesses. Clearly, they have become incidents of board-level importance, writes Justhy Deva Prasad, chief data partner at Claritysquare.

Rapid changes in the cryptocurrency's valuation make it hard to properly price content purchases according to Steam.