Business Intelligence (BI)

Merchant Warehouse, a leading provider of payment technologies and merchant account services, has entered into a partnership with Revel Systems, a point-of-sale software developer. 

According to both companies, Revel Systems' integration with Merchant Warehouse's Genius Customer Engagement Platform enables merchants to gain greater business intelligence capabilities to more effectively streamline, analyze and grow their businesses.

By Pascale Juan, I Love Velvet

As the payments industry moves at lightning speed and technology changes rapidly, it can be a challenge to keep pace with the security payments and standards of the mobile payments industry. In addition, one of the most frustrating areas of mobile security is the challenge of navigating global security requirements. As a global brand, using mobile point-of-sale (MPOS) requires compliance with the differing security certifications and methods in various countries.

Atif Rafiq was named to the newly created position of chief digital officer at McDonald’s after previously serving as general manager of Kindle Direct Publishing at Amazon.

In his new role, Rafiq will lead McDonald's global digital strategy focusing on future growth in e-commerce, modernizing the restaurant experience and engaging with consumers across the digital landscape. Rafiq will report to chief brand officer Steve Easterbrook.

BitPay, a payment service provider specializing in e-commerce, B2B and enterprise solutions for virtual currencies, is now offering translations into 10 languages plus English for its entire checkout experience.

Merchants servicing international customers can now present bitcoin payment instructions in the buyer’s native language, allowing merchants to more easily conduct business in emerging markets.

Doubling your store count is the type of growth most retailers seek. So 38-unit, Louisiana-based grocery retailer Rouses didn’t complain back in 2007 when it upped its store count in Louisiana and Mississippi from 15 to 32 by purchasing the regional Sav-A-Center chain from A&P. However, for a family-owned business that had previously grown organically, this sudden spurt in its number and distribution of stores created a few issues.

Borrowers have more flexiblity, but also face more complex marketplace

For mid-size retail companies — those with anywhere from $10 million to $1 billion in revenue — the combination of today’s steady growth and affordable capital is rare indeed. There is also ample liquidity as traditional middle-market lenders are being joined by institutional investors with deep pockets and a strong desire to participate in these loans. What’s more, new products are available that give borrowers more flexibility. In short, it’s a near ideal environment for midsize company borrowers.

Hudson’s Bay measures incremental ROI of printed offers

Despite the digitization of most customer-facing communication, printed flyers are still an important promotional vehicle for many retailers. By analyzing terabytes of offer-, store- and item-level sales data for products promoted in its weekly flyers, Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) is determining the true incremental return on printed promotions and optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of its flyer-based marketing efforts for its Hudson’s Bay stores.

New York – Verizon is preparing for the fourth quarter beta release of Verizon Cloud, its new cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform and cloud-based object storage service. With this service, Verizon hopes to combine the agility and economic benefit of a generic public cloud with the reliability and scale of an enterprise-level service, along with a high degree of control of performance.