Retailers

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is sending a message to the payments industry that it might not be wise to wait on the card networks to solve the growing problem of mobile and online payments fraud.

As the pressure to monetize data in an omnichannel environment increases, so does the fear of misuse.

Amazon Go may be stealing the spotlight, but it is far from alone in the rush to revolutionize in-store checkout through the use of sensors, scanners, mobile devices and more.

While the battle for the consumer’s coffee or tea beverage, both hot and cold, is increasingly moving in a mobile direction, the challenge remains as to whether Dunkin’s recent moves are enough for it to succeed against Starbucks.

David Mangum will be leaving his post as president and chief operating officer of Global Payments, an announcement that came on the same day it inked deals to retain other top execs, including CEO Jeff Sloan.

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

The new optimism is fueled by rising standards of living, increases in smartphone usage and cheap data plans that are boosting internet penetration across the nation. Perhaps most important, India is the last big retail market still up for grabs, with an internet economy projected to double to $250 billion by 2020.

New Merchant Advisory Group chief John Drechny will push open standards for payments acceptance and security technology that doesn't impact customer experience.

Nedbank Money users can store payment card data in just one app for all the main South African scan-to-pay schemes, representing a combined footprint of over 100,000 retail points of presence and 800 billers.

There is space for banks to enter a market they largely ignore, according to William Phelan, president of PayNet.

The Lightning Connector eliminates the need for merchants using the Square Reader to rely on a 3.5mm headphone jack of a smartphone or tablet to operate with its mobile app.

Institutions must enhance their fraud prevention strategy, and the most effective and successful way for doing so is by empowering customers to detect and respond to suspicious activity before the funds ever leave their account, writes Deborah Peace, CEO of ACH Alert.

Google can’t underestimate the importance of its maiden voyage with Google Wallet and the lessons the company learned in being one of the first to offer payments through cellphones in the U.S.

The retailer-driven Merchant Customer Exchange initiative to create a common mobile wallet had good intentions, but it overlooked the nature of retail itself — that each company has to differentiate itself to lure customers.

Along with activating contactless payments at its store terminals, Costco has opened its checkout lines to Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay. But there’s a catch.

Bitcoin's scale and energy consumption have held it back as a payments option, but there are advancements that can change that, according to Jan-Willem Burgers, Europe technology lead with the distributed ledger practice at Capgemini.

Even as the payments landscape has become increasingly complicated and convoluted over the past several years, many industry players have not kept pace with their payments testing methods or tools, writes Steve Gilde, director of global product marketing for Paragon Application Systems.

Installing a modern payment gateway, for example, makes the checkout process more convenient, speeding up order processing while offering alternative payment methods, saved customer information and location-specific options, writes Amit Bhaiya, co-founder and CEO of DotcomWeavers.

With increasing value propositions, use of Apple Pay for in-store purchases should continue to increase, writes Mohammad Khan, president and co-founder of Omnyway.

Consumers, who often understand little to anything about the fees retailers pay to accept cards, will not care about the details of the fight and will place their displeasure solely on the shoulders of any large retailer that elects this strategy, writes Myron Schwarcz, executive vice president of Strategic Resource Management.