Worldwide trends--toward convenience, rapid action, digital integration, and away from cash--in payment systems continue to play out in the latest news. Here are a few items that reinforce the movements "The Payoff" earlier described in more detail:

Apple, Google, Sprint, Western Union, Visa: electronic wallets continue to attract investments from many of the world's largest and best-known companies.

As a logistics specialist, your focus needs to be on ensuring a minimum of delay from factory to shelf, a maximum of compliance at the loading dock, retention of your experienced staff, trouble-free account management, and other matters that bear directly on supply-chain efficiency. Computer software is at best a means to those ends, and mostly deserves to be left to the information technology (IT) staffers who devote their full-time attention to it.