2020s Payment Trends, Fighting Fraud With AI, Gas Station Cyberattacks Top This Week’s News

PYMNTS Weekender

It’s the end of the workweek, and the PYMNTS Weekender is here to make sure you didn’t miss anything — with the latest in payments and commerce news. We have a deep, data-supported dive on fighting fraud with artificial intelligence (AI), an outlook on seven 2020 trendlines and news on gas station cyberattacks.

Top News

PNC Blocks Venmo, Tells Users To Switch To Zelle

FinTech firms have reportedly been accusing banks of preventing access to the financial data of end-users. With PNC Bank, in one case, clients noted they were unable to link accounts to Venmo. The bank has suggested that those Venmo users switch to Zelle per tweets from PNC.

How Grocery Retail Will Evolve In 2020                             

Grocers are stepping up their digital game, and the trends in play now promise to become even larger in the new year. Shoppers are an ever-evolving group, and the emergence of the era of digital commerce has undeniably changed the landscape for groceries.

What’s Next For Payments In The Next Decade: The Seven 2020 Trendlines

The combination of smartphones and apps has changed how we shop, how we pay, how we discover and consume information, how we bank, how we connect with people, how we work, and even how we are paid over the last 10 years. But, in many ways, the 2010s, was the warmup act for the transformation yet to come.

That is, the transition from an app economy to one in which connected ecosystems aggregate commerce experiences and enable transactions across channels, environments, and devices.

Visa Warns Of Rise In Gas Station POS Cyberattacks

Visa says cybercriminals are using new strategies to steal credit card information from around the country. Most are familiar with “skimming” attacks at gas stations, but the new attacks are more complex and need more technical knowledge.  Visa identified three different types of attacks.

Tracker and Reports

How TripAdvisor Fights Fake Reviews

Consumers rely on the reviews of other customers, a dependence that has only grown deeper in the age of online shopping and travel. Making sure that customers are protected, and that false reviews can be isolated and taken down, is critical for companies, said James Kay, director of corporate communications for travel marketplace TripAdvisor.

Priceline Uses AI To Help Fight Fraud

The online travel industry is a pot of gold for bad actors, using stolen payment credentials to buy vacation packages and resell them for profit. Combating fraud, however, comes at a cost, as burdensome security procedures may scare away legitimate customers.

In a feature story, PYMNTS spoke with Eric Lorenz, vice president of finance operations for Priceline, about how the company leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to promote seamlessness as well as security.

Caribou Coffee New Mobile App Uses Tech For Loyalty And Payments

Major coffee players were among the first to embrace mobile order-ahead, and smaller chains such as  Caribou Coffee are closely following their developments. In a feature story, PYMNTS spoke with the company’s senior director, Caroline Larson, about how the chain’s rewards system changed from a surprise-and-delight model to a loyalty program based on points, and what it learned from large industry players when it came to in-store pickup.

Fun, Cool and Otherwise Interesting

Millennials Make Big Push For B2B Personalization

Personalization is becoming a bigger part of the overall consumer experience, thanks to better data analysis — including via artificial intelligence as well as machine learning, among other burgeoning innovations. More personalization seems likely to come to the business-to-business (B2B) side of the equation.

Part the push for B2B personalization comes from the fact that many B2B participants are simply getting younger and are taking their desires as well as their expectations for personalization with them into the B2B world.

Why Voice And Smart Homes Will Be Even Bigger In The 2020s 

The rise of the so-called smart home — powered in large part by voice-assisted retail and payments — will be one of the main trendlines of the 2020s. Apple, Amazon, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance, for its part, unveiled a new working group to promote the adoption of a new royalty-free connectivity standard to make smart home products more compatible with security as a design tenet.

Why Rent The Runway Wants To Become The Amazon Prime Of Retail

Rent the Runway has expanded its partnerships and areas of interest. This year, it teamed with retailer west elm to expand into home goods, partnered with W Hotels to bring its rental goods to travelers and partnered with Nordstrom to put drop boxes in 29 of its locations nationwide. That’s not bad work for a company that, at base, doesn’t even consider itself a fashion firm.

Rent the Runway COO Anushka Salinas told PYMNTS in a recent conversation, “We are, at our core, a tech and logistics company that happened to have started our journey in fashion. The reverse logistics platform we have created in-house can power any rental business, and our aspiration is to be the ‘Amazon Prime of rental.’”

Smile! Retailers Want To Take More Of Your Pictures 

Cameras are, at least somewhat quietly, making inroads into retail outlets in an attempt to get to know you. They would target you through demographics spanning gender as well as age. The goal, then, is not to see who might be stealing, but to draw a bead on who might be buying and then send ads in real time as shoppers ostensibly consider what will go into the basket.