I just came back from three weeks of being on the road. I ran a workshop on merchant-funded rewards at Merchant Payments Ecosystem event in Berlin, presented on mobile payments at Celent’s own (and very successful!) Insight and Innovation Day in Boston last week, and managed to squeeze a holiday on the snow in between. [...]

Despite increasing online-offline convergence in retailing, there is still a chasm between online and offline payments which today’s digital wallets are struggling to cross. It remains a challenge today to use secure element-based payment credentials online and cloud-based credentials at the physical POS, although various solutions to bridge the divide are emerging. The above statements [...]