Retailers

If American Express is going to soar in the future, it plans to do so firmly attached to the new 11-year contract it has signed with Delta Airlines.

SnapPay has grown rapidly in its role as an acquirer and payments gateway for Chinese mobile payment acceptance in North America, and it is ready to show merchants the next step.

A hacker can infect multiple point-of-sale terminals with malware by entering through a "smart" coffee vending machine at a grocery store or restaurant. And the store owners are largely unaware of the risk.

Mastercard and MercadoPago, the payments arm of Latin American e-marketplace MercadoLibre, see opportunities for contactless prepaid cards among unbanked consumers even though local issuers have been slow to adopt the format.

Social media commerce platform provider Jumper.ai is helping Amazon merchants complete online transactions without the buyer being redirected to the Amazon online marketplace.

Amazon Go is caving to rising pressure from cities and states banning cashless stores and planning to introduce cash-acceptance to a model whose entire premise was about eliminating the friction of checkout with a seamless, card-based checkout.

Traditional U.S. retail is in crisis at the hands of e-commerce. Bankers have a role to play to stop the bleeding through a combination of service, incentives, and payments technology.

Grocers, alarmed at Amazon.com Inc.’s rapid growth in Europe, are considering fighting back with the help of a tiny Portuguese startup.

As more stores either close down or try to ban the use of cash, they aren't necessarily driving cash users to cards and mobile wallets. Instead, they are driving some to an environment that is, counterintuitively, more cash-friendly than ever: e-commerce.

Amazon’s incursion into brick and mortar has been aggressive, but not without its share of course corrections. The latest is a new round of price cuts at Whole Foods amid whispers of slow Prime traffic at the high-end grocer.

Western Union has found a way to expand its U.S. footprint without building new storefronts through a strategic relationship it’s established with deep-discounter Dollar General.

Walmart customers will soon be able to shop for groceries online using Google hardware, giving the retailer an established market for voice ordering — that is still a distant second to Amazon's Alexa user base.

Serving the small-business market requires more than just rebranding a plastic card. There are certain functions related to expense tracking, for example, that don't come up in a typical consumer relationship.

The FIS-Worldpay and Fiserv-First Data combos do provide notable scale, but the even-larger companies still won't produce the same pace of growth that younger nimble fintechs enjoy, says Eric Grover, a principal at Intrepid Ventures.

Jumia Technologies AG said Mastercard Inc. has agreed to invest 50 million euros ($56 million) in a private placement ahead of the Africa-focused online retailer’s planned initial public offering in New York.

While banks are oftentimes simply too big to react to this consumer change quickly, more agile fintechs have been much faster to prioritize mobile-first POS financing, argues Nufar Segal, general manager of consumer financing at Jifiti.

In the emerging ecosystem economy, merchants will need to provide a seamless buying journey for customers. That means everything from a dynamic user interface and smart authentication to contactless payment options for faster transaction times, writes Paul Perry, a contributor for the technology company Relay.

Once Apple looked at the state of its existing ecosystem, it identified a space it could uniquely deliver on, and activated the partners needed to make it come to fruition — a perfect example of the concept of ecosystem enablement, argues Frank Kenney, director of market strategy for Cleo.

U.S. lawmakers are not enthusiastic about the cashless trend being driven by the likes of Amazon Go, sweetgreen, and numerous other merchants of all sizes.

The U.K. prepaid gift card market is experiencing strong growth among consumers who buy them as gifts and for self-use, as well as among businesses that purchase them for customer loyalty programs and as employee incentives.