As Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, we dive into how the company has grown as leader in marketing, retail, and services—and what’s next.

Toast is leaning on Toast IQ’s AI as a central strategy.

The news: OpenAI is working on an enterprise product that would rival both Microsoft 365 and Google Workplace, per The Information. The features would allow user collaboration within documents and chat capabilities among co-workers, according to two sources. Our take: OpenAI has the potential to be an all-in-one solution if it could use its interface as a document creator and data storage solution, but Microsoft’s and Google’s brand recognition in that space is likely to keep ChatGPT enterprise solutions on the sidelines—for now.

US digital commerce platforms will process $471.37 billion of their own payments by 2026. As a result, they’ll enjoy stronger customer relationships, added revenues, and cross-sell synergy.

In the third of five reports in our “Payments Ecosystem 2024” collection, we unpack how the lines between POS hardware and software are disappearing as providers push the innovation envelope.

Acquirers, networks, and issuers each play distinct roles in the payments purchasing chain. But those roles are shifting as providers adapt to the rise of software and value-added services, increased payment method choice, and cloud-based innovation.

Digital commerce platforms are leaning heavily into payment processing to grow revenues and enhance customer engagement. But it’s still early innings: They are ripe for payment provider partnerships that can evolve as the platforms grow.

Marketers across industries still need to produce impactful campaigns despite having fewer resources and increased scrutiny on ad spend. To meet business goals and stretch ad dollars, marketers should stay hyper-focused on customer acquisition and meeting audiences where they are.

To stand out against competitors, tech leaders must sharpen their agility to act quickly on emerging opportunities, zero in on key priorities, and carefully allocate budgets.

Worldpay for Platforms offers embedded payment capabilities for software providers. Here’s why payment firms are targeting this group.

Europe’s startup slaughterhouse: After pandemic-era fattening, inflation, war, and an energy crisis have triggered a pullback in startup investment. Wintertime natural gas supplies and hiring are key indicators to watch.

The resilient cloud: The world is spending more on cloud infrastructure than ever before—underscoring tech’s most buoyant sector despite inflation, rising interest rates, and a down economy. But can networks handle unprecedented cloud growth?

Increasing digitization among the 32 million US small businesses is changing the competitive landscape and forcing banks, acquirers, and fintechs to invest in next-generation features. These features range from payments and value-added services to outreach.

Businesses have been moving their data operations to the cloud for years, but the low latency, fast speeds, and decentralized architecture of 5G networks will accelerate this trend and create opportunities for financial services firms to design much more flexible teams and offices.

Traditionally, organizations haven’t viewed the customer experience as a singular thing owned by one particular person or department. That’s changed, as brands have worked to put customers at the forefront—and it’s given modern CMOs new importance as owners of that experience.

US advertisers are spending about a third of their nonsocial programmatic display ad dollars on fees this year—aka the “ad tech tax.” Read on to learn more about our inaugural estimates of spending on programmatic fees.