POS and Retail

American Express has positioned itself as a small-business champion for decades, but its partnership with Amazon illustrates the paradox of supporting mom-and-pop shops by enabling them to buy supplies from their largest competitor.

Ant Financial, Alibaba’s finance affiliate controlled by billionaire Jack Ma, agreed to buy a stake in the Brazilian payments firm StoneCo Ltd after the company prices its initial public offering, joining Warren Buffett in investing in Brazil’s booming financial-technology startup landscape.

Amazon.com Inc. and American Express Co. are upping the ante in their bid for small-business spending.

Today, you can sell anywhere in the world successfully with just a single payment gateway integration, writes Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap.

As VR and AR mature, new possibilities open up for customer interaction in a virtual space.

PayPal reports it’s adding users to Venmo’s new initiatives quickly, pushing the company’s wish to monetize Venmo to what its CEO calls a “tipping point."

Square’s growth strategy has always been to aim higher with products and services that benefit larger businesses than the ones it originally targeted with its mobile card reader. Its newest product diverges from that path.

Banks currently enjoy the pole position, but until they revamp and modernize their lending processes to better compete with the speed and convenience of nontraditional lenders, they will continue to lose market share, writes Trevor Dryer, CEO and co-founder of Mirador.

Intent on rapidly capturing the value and benefits of these new services, companies too often take a path of least resistance to cloud assessment and operational planning, writes Justin Yunag, chief digital officer, financial services for Atos North America Operations.

Marks & Spencer is the first major U.K. retailer to launch a mobile scanning and payment app in its stores. Several U.K. supermarket chains have launched pilots of cashierless and checkout-free mobile shopping, but have yet to roll out services.