Carrefour Poland has launched its pioneering “Scan&Go” service embedded in its shopping application, which enables self-service product scanning as well as in-app payments with Masterpass, all in a customer’s own smartphone. The solution, designed to eliminate queues at cash registers and improve customer experience, has just concluded a pilot stage and is going to be gradually launched in Carrefour stores across Poland.

Smartphones to replace cash registers and wallets

The new “Scan&Go” service is part of the “My Carrefour” mobile app, which until now was mainly used to manage Carrefour’s loyalty program. The app’s new functionality allows customers to scan product barcodes in store aisles using the smartphone’s camera. The value of all scanned products is automatically added up and displayed within the app so that consumers have real-time control over the amount they are about to spend on their shopping.

To finalize the purchase, consumers using the “Scan&Go” service can choose between a payment card, Masterpass for a quick and convenient cashless payment, or cash as their payment option. Masterpass by Mastercard, simplifies the checkout process with one secure account by allowing users to use multiple participating credit or debit cards encoded in a “digital wallet”. The Masterpass account comes with multi-tiered security. This includes the use of unique values (i.e. transaction tokens, card identifiers) enabling payment without the necessity to handle actual card details, bringing another layer of protection.

Ultimately, the new “Scan&Go” service with Masterpass is designed to allow customers to check out in a Carrefour store without having to go through a physical check-out register at all.

“Neither consumers nor retailers want to spend time and attention on handling payments. All in all, shopping, not paying, is the reason why consumers go to a store. That is why shopping solutions of the future will be automated and guarantee customers seamless and secure payments within a blink of an eye” – says Bartosz Ciołkowski, head of Mastercard Poland. “Mastercard’s opinion polls confirm that Polish consumers are very open to new technological solutions, which let them shop faster and more conveniently. Therefore, we believe that Carrefour’s ‘Scan&Go’ service with Masterpass will be well received and will help Poland pave the way for consumers and retailers in other countries.”

“Already over one third of Poles make mobile payments, which means using a smartphone or a tablet. It is obvious that with the growth of the mobile technology market and more young customers in our consumer database, this percentage will grow” – says Marcin Olech, Marketing, Digital and Financial Services Director at Carrefour Polska. “With “Scan & Go”, we want to guarantee that they can visit Carrefour stores and shop and pay the way they want. Quick and safe.”

Consumers open to automated in-store solutions

According to the opinion poll commissioned by Mastercard among Polish consumers[1], respondents are happy to use automated shopping solutions. This is because they realize it helps them reduce the waiting times spent queuing – the most frustrating aspect of everyday shopping. For example, the majority (61%) of respondents prefer cashless payments, especially contactless ones, over cash, as they believe that this speeds up customer service at cash registers. Also, they are willing to use new checkout solutions, such as self-service cash registers or scanning products on their own with the use of a smartphone or a retailer’s barcode reader. Over half of respondents (52%) would like to try fully automated solutions, which allow to skip the cash register.

Mastercard’s survey also confirms that more and more consumers use their smartphones in a store. Already 1/3 of respondents in Poland do it on regular basis, mainly to: read a shopping list (78%), look for information about products (74%), compare prices (70%), check recipes (58%) or pay mobile (47%). This proves that the smartphone is becoming a universal and increasingly popular shopping tool for consumers. At the same time, it gives retailers an opportunity to reach out to their customers in new ways and present them with personalized offers.

Discover announced today that cardmembers now can redeem Cashback Bonus® for a statement credit through Apple Pay. 

Payment Alliance International (PAI), the nation’s largest, privately-held ATM provider, today announced the release of its much anticipated PAI Mobile app.

Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM:DWCH) today at the HR Technology Conference, announced a joint technology partnership with Sage, market leader in cloud accounting software. Through this partnership, Sage validates the Datawatch Monarch self-service data preparation platform as a solution for its accounting, HR, payroll, payments and enterprise service offerings, enabling Sage and its partners to accelerate product implementations, and end customers to simplify data preparation.

Datawatch Monarch enables analysts and business users to overcome traditional data challenges by easily and quickly accessing, manipulating, enriching and combining disparate data from virtually any source (e.g., PDF reports, text files, CSV, JSON), and then quickly preparing it for analysis and reporting - without coding, manual data entry or involvement from IT. Additionally, Datawatch Monarch streamlines and standardizes data formatting and migration for accelerated enterprise software and cloud deployments.

"With Datawatch Monarch, our customers and partners no longer need to struggle with time-intensive and error-prone manual data entry," said Jennifer Warawa, EVP of Partners, Accountants and Alliances at Sage. "Whether managing money or people, businesses now have the power to unlock data from accounting, HR/payroll and other enterprise systems, and then quickly prepare it for analysis, reconciliation, reporting and compliance purposes. This results in more informed decision-making and improved operational processes. And that, along with faster implementation times, enables us to provide a major competitive advantage and better customer experience."

"Regardless of department, every employee must now be able find, extract, analyze and share the data that is vital for them to fulfill their job responsibilities and drive the business forward," said Ken Tacelli, chief operating officer at Datawatch. "Datawatch Monarch gives even novice business users the ability to streamline their accounting and HR processes and access and create trusted datasets for analytics, while upholding data governance. At the same time, implementation service teams gain the ability to quickly and easily manipulate and combine disparate data from virtually any source and prepare it for migration. Sage understands this, and we look forward to helping its partners and customers transform the way they use data and bring value to their companies."

For more information about Datawatch Monarch, please visit: http://www.datawatch.com/our-platform/monarch/. To learn more about Sage, go to: https://www.sage.com/en-us/.

Faced with the exponential development of chatbots and voice assistants, VISEO is launching VISEO Bot Maker in order to enable companies to embrace this new revolution in uses and reduce the cost of innovation for this new type of services.         
Facing an ecosystem under construction, VISEO Bot Maker is an open source platform that facilitates the design and accelerates the development of chatbots and voice assistants - to scale.

Every day, millions of people use artificial intelligence through e-mail platforms or voice assistants, to perform simple tasks, get help, buy products, book trips, stay informed, ... everywhere and anytime.
The interface becomes the conversation, a conversation that transforms the relationship with the machine into a more human one. There is no need for time spent on cumbersome search anymore, one can get immediate answers thanks to the exploitation of data and bricks of artificial intelligence. Brands have the unique opportunity to create customized and contextualized relationships at every stage of the customer journey: from discovery to payment.  
This is a fundamental trend: initiated by WeChat in 2009, accelerated by Facebook in 2016 with the opening of its Messenger platform to brands (more than 100,000 bots, and 1.2 billion users), amplified by the recent arrival (Google Home, Amazon Echo, ...) who are finding their place more and more in homes and in cars in the foreseeable future.

To meet these new opportunities, VISEO chose to make its VISEO Bot Maker platform open source in order to support the exponential development of personal assistants.

"With the launch of VISEO Bot Maker, we position ourselves today in an ambitious way on what will be the future of interfaces, more natural and “ambient”: today the keyboard, the thumb and tomorrow the voice. "said Eric Perrier, CEO of VISEO.   
"To support the industrialization of these new services, we opted for open source because it is nowadays essential to offer alternative routes than those proposed by the market. It is an alternative to, on the one hand, very vertical and integrated solutions carried by the GAFA, and on the other hand, very young ones proposed by an eclectic proliferation of starts-up with fragile destiny. " continues Eric Perrier. "By opening the code of our platform, we want to accelerate the development of chatbots and focus on the core value of chatbots: user experience more than technology. We invite all project leaders and developers from around the world to use and come to contribute to this initiative! ".

VISEO Bot Maker enables companies to master the behavior and development of this new type of service.

Over the last 12 months, VISEO Bot Maker has been used on more than 20 industrial projects for clients from different sectors (energy, retail, luxury, hotel, consumer, insurance, ...).                  

VISEO Bot Maker: a visual design tool for conversation

VISEO Bot Maker is primarily a visual interface that allows focus on the heart of the value of a chatbot: the design of conversation, more than technology that tends to become a convenience.
The interface allows you to simply design a drag-and-drop conversation with the many bricks placed at its disposal to create the richest and most complete experience possible for the end user. This visual approach reconciles the functional issues with the need to interrogate APIs specific to the IS of the companies.

VISEO Bot Maker: a modular and multichannel platform

VISEO Bot Maker allows to share the development of a chatbot through an interconnection with multiple messaging channels: Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, Skype, Telegram, but also WeChat, Google Home/Assistant, Amazon Echo, and Cortana.

VISEO Bot Maker makes it possible to develop relevant and powerful virtual assistants by being connected natively to the various resources needed:

- key bricks of artificial intelligence: the notorious bricks of NLP (Natural Language Processing) but also services of automatic translation, language detection or computer vision.

- enterprise core information systems (ERP, CRM, ...) - notably those of SAP, Microsoft, and Salesforce - but also third-party external services thanks to its modular architecture.

SafeCharge, a leader in advanced payment technologies, today announces it has been selected by Goldmoney Inc. (TSX:XAU), a precious metal financial service and technology company traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, to further expand its online and mobile deposit options. By integrating Goldmoney’s new platform to SafeCharge’s Payments Engine, Goldmoney will provide its customers with access to both cards and alternative payment methods, such as WeChat Pay, Alipay, SEPA, UnionPay, and additional payment integrations, enabling them to expand their global client access to vaulted gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. 

“We continue to build upon our unrivalled savings and payments platform, and add payment methods and functionality to accommodate clients in every corner of the globe. We’re pleased to continue to work with SafeCharge, a leading agile and innovative payments service partner, to further expand our global reach and cross-border payment solutions," said Goldmoney COO Paul Mennega. “By integrating Alipay and WeChat Pay, we’ve made it easier for hundreds of millions of mobile-first consumers and businesses to deposit into a Goldmoney Holding. We will soon launch our Apple Pay integration, further reducing friction between the platform and global money and payments systems.”

“Offering an optimal payment method mix is crucial when it comes to achieving success in e-commerce,” said SafeCharge COO Yuval Ziv. “By integrating key payment methods such as WeChat Pay and Alipay, global companies such as Goldmoney expand their payments portfolio to better serve tech savvy online and mobile customers.”

International mobile payment service provider, Tola Mobile, has today announced further expansion in Africa, it now processes 15 million monthly transactions across the continent with its Tola.wallet platform. The solution enables companies to receive and make real time payments throughout Africa and is experiencing significant month-on-month growth in the number of transactions processed across the regions supported.

In addition to reporting 15 million payments processed per month, Tola Mobile is seeing continued growth across West and East Africa with new offices in Uganda, Ghana and Tanzania. The firm has already launched integrations with two sports brands in Tanzania - Mkekabet and Sokabet, as well as online gambling platforms in both Uganda, Ghana and Mozambique.

In August, Tola Mobile announced a range of updates to its Tola.wallet offering, designed to give customers a seamless mobile payments experience. Tola Mobile can now reconcile transactions that would previously have been delayed or even potentially lost when outages and downtime occur within the region’s Mobile Network Operators.

Africa has seen a significant rise in the growth of its mobile money ecosystem. There are now 30 million mPesa subscribers in Kenya, processing at least 1.1 trillion Kenyan shillings ($10.6 billion) a quarter, a significant percentage of the country's GDP.

Shane Leahy, CEO of Tola Mobile, comments: “The mobile payment ecosystem has grown significantly within the African market as consumers and merchants look for faster and more resilient ways to make and receive payments. Given the exponential growth of the marketplace, we anticipate that Tola Mobile will be processing one million daily transactions in the region within the next 12 months.”

The advantages of Tola.wallet being able to reconcile lost transactions are numerous, not least of which for the gambling industry, as it ensures there is minimum delay for gamblers to receive payouts into their betting accounts despite unfortunate network outages and downtime.

IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, today announced that its Information Mosaic business is launching a new corporate actions solution specifically designed to meet the needs of global investment banks. This innovative solution, IMActions for Investment Banking, manages the entire corporate actions lifecycle from announcement capture and validation to downstream processing.

“We’ve spent the past 24 months working with several of the world’s leading banks to develop this cutting-edge solution, which automates the complex problem of asset servicing in the trading environment,” said Paul Taylor, managing director of Information Mosaic for IHS Markit. “With existing clients integrating the solution into their investment banking technology ecosystems, our user community will enjoy all the mutualised cost benefits of a standardised solution, rather than individual institutions having to invest time and money in maintaining expensive legacy platforms.”

Traditionally, the investment banking industry has built its own solutions to address these complex asset servicing requirements. However, as a generation of these applications nears end-of-life, Information Mosaic has collaborated with its global user community to extend its established IMActions platform to service the specific needs of the investment banking market. 

“Historically, investment banks and broker dealers have found it challenging to systematically manage and automate the workflow between client and market-side positions due to the complexity of position keeping intrinsic to the products and services they offer,” Taylor said. “To address this challenge, IMActions for Investment Banking supports the real-time reconciliation of client and market-side positions associated with a corporate action event. This process enables the delivery of correct market-side instructions and the settlement of subsequent cash and stock transactions, removing many of the operational risks currently associated with asset servicing within the industry.”

IMActions has an established client base of leading universal banks and custodians. Many of these existing clients have large investment banking franchises, which will benefit from Information Mosaic’s multi-entity, single platform solution.