Digital and mobile have transformed how consumers and the brands they love interact across all of the many commerce checkpoints available to them. To be valuable, those interactions must go even beyond the convenience of using a voice activated assistant to trigger a transaction, to having a true virtual assistant who serves as the consumer’s payments concierge.

Paying a water bill that appears abnormally large becomes a prompt for alerting the consumers whether a leak is the cause of the higher bill. Knowing that the kid’s Spring concert is a few weeks away triggers a suggestion to make a restaurant reservation at the family’s favorite after the concert is over, that’s already staged for payment once the meal is complete.

To solve this problem, PYMNTS, the premier source of news and analysis on innovation in payments and commerce, is launching its 2019 Voice Challenge with Amazon Alexa. Throughout this event, we will bring together top innovative teams to develop and execute a prototype using Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, to remove points of friction and add value to the payments and commerce ecosystem.

Teams participating in the challenge will have more than two months to develop their voice-activated payments and commerce-focused skills, receiving guidance by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and Alexa’s developer team members to help fine-tune their innovations.