The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we live, work, and interact with each other. We've all had to make adjustments to the way we do things, including the way we shop. We're now seeing a shift towards contactless and digital payments, which has made it easier for us to stay safe and healthy while still being able to purchase the items we need. Contactless payments have become increasingly popular during the pandemic and offer a range of benefits. Not only are they faster, more convenient, and more secure than traditional payment methods, but they also provide an extra layer of protection from the virus.

Every year, it gets harder to keep up with technology updates in convenience services. For many industry players, the pandemic put some projects on hold, but the surging interest in contactless transactions accelerated expansion of technology innovation. An early morning session, "Trending Technologies in Convenience Services," gave attendees a chance to unpack the key tech innovations at the National Automatic Merchandising Association show at Chicago's McCormick Place. "The pandemic has given us a lot of new terms, and it's also accelerated the digital transformation of the industry," session moderator Michael Kasavana, Ph.D., the NAMA endowed professor emeritus, observed at the outset. The well attended session provided updates on artificial intelligence services for convenience services, contactless payments and ways to prevent the growing cybercrime threat.

In industries from healthcare to education to finance to manufacturing, quarantine and extended work-from-home forced companies to use technology to reimagine nearly every facet of their operations. As the world reopens in fits and starts, we analyze the industries poised to thrive in a post-Covid world. As the Covid-19 pandemic has charted its unprecedented path around the world, it's carried with it the question: What will Covid-19's legacy be? From healthcare to education to entertainment to manufacturing, technology innovators are stepping forward to help answer that question. "Crisis can be… a catalyst or can speed up changes that are on the way -- it almost can serve as an accelerant." In the wake of the outbreak, everything from doctors appointments to schooling to workouts went online. As more people have worked, learned, banked, exercised, relaxed, and even sought medical care from home during Covid-19, they have gotten a crash course in just how much can be accomplished at ...

New technologies have enabled banks, insurers and other financial services firms to overhaul their operations and identify different ways of serving their clients. Over recent decades, innovative products have transformed the financial services industry – from payment types including credit and debit cards, to transaction processing such as telephone and online banking, to saving options such as investment funds and structured products, to e-commerce for financial assets, to risk management techniques, and beyond. Financial services firms must embrace the opportunities offered by innovation and further integrate disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, robotics, the cloud and blockchain, to enable new services and capabilities. While there is still a place for traditional banking and financial services, customer expectations and preferences are evolving. According to VMware, almost half of UK consumers prefer to engage with banks via apps rather than in person, while two-fifths believe their smartphone is more important than their wallet in powering financial transactions.

As payment technologies become more secure and sophisticated, so do the techniques used to break them and steal money. Introduction of Europay, Mastercard and Visa cards (EMV), regulations for e-commerce websites like GDPR and PCI-DSS and contactless payments over smartphones have gone a long way to enhance the security in retail payments. However, fraudsters are finding new tactics to hack into these advanced payment technologies. Therefore, fraud detection and prevention systems need to be continuously upgraded to keep up with new payment technologies as well as the new methods used to perpetrate fraud. In this article, we will focus specifically on how AI is used to prevent threats due to payment frauds.

With the fear of contracting the coronavirus pervading most aspects of daily life, consumers are embracing contactless systems for transactions and spurring the growth of artificial intelligence-driven smart stores. Ecommerce had been growing steadily before the pandemic hit, and the contagion only accelerated the trend away from brick-and-mortar operations. Total online sales reached $73.2 billion in June, up 76.2% from one year ago, Adobe Analytics reported. Coresight Research said the pandemic has forced retailers to innovate, leveraging technology to create a more efficient supply chain and generate growth. At the same time, it has become necessary to reduce contact between employees and consumers, forcing retailers to embrace curbside pickup, cashier-less stores, contactless payment and vending machines.

When we saw personal robots being discontinued last year, we couldn't figure out why these technologies are not getting there yet. We can't deny the fact that every future technology comes with glitches. Some of these glitches are so intense that it becomes hard to even accept that form of tech in our everyday life. Just when you think of riding a self-driving car, you hear about a crash, and the dreams of stepping into the future shatter instantly. But 2020 has been showing us a whole new form of life we've never dreamt of before.

Back in March, shortly after the coronavirus had been deemed a national crisis, I walked into a 7-Eleven to pick up a late-night snack. Taped to the door was a makeshift sign warning not to touch the Slurpee machine to limit the risk of viral spread. I glanced at the coolers full of soft drinks, the touchscreen payment reader beside the cash register, the plastic surface of the smartphone case I'd touched perhaps 2,600 times that day. Maybe the Slurpee machine was riskier by some small degree than these other surfaces, but by how much? The whole strange episode called me to wonder if people would recall this time as the death knell of public touchscreens, or at least the dawn of a new era in conversant interfaces, an age in which our voices, not our hands, would help us navigate the world.

Economics, money, and the way we make payments have undergone several changes since the time of the Stone Age. In a sense all these are key indicators of our progress as a species. The primitive methods indicated our primitive way of living. Similarly, the current payment methods powered by cutting-edge technology boast our technological achievements of today. Digitization of payments was a huge jump towards the goal to achieve an easy, convenient, fast, and secure payment method.

A new smart bracelet allows you to use your index finger as a phone using technology that conducts sound via vibrations through your wrist bone. The Get bracelet, which costs £200 ($250)connects to your smartphone and translates the sound from your device into vibrations, conducted into the fingers. Users just have to stick a finger in their ear to speak on the phone, and make outgoing calls by using the bracelet's voice recognition technology. Because the device uses vibration only, instead of sound, conversations can't be overheard by people nearby. Get has no buttons, and no screen, but uses your voice and gestures to control its features, according to its Italian inventors.