Loading up your Kindle or travel bag with summer reading? Business Week features a list of summer reading recommended by business professors. As you would expect, business books dominate – but there are a wide range of topics – and even a few novels.
I can personally recommend these titles from the list:
- The Ascent of Money (Penguin Press, November 2008) by Niall Ferguson
- Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
And here’s the stack waiting for me (I’m away on business now, but already made a pile of books to take up to Lake Tahoe for 4th of July):
- Yes We Did! An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand (Voices That Matter) (New Riders Press, May 2009) by Rahaf Harfoush
- Strategy & The Fat Smoker (The Spangle Press) by David Maister
- Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather (I just recommended this to one of my colleagues who was in Santa Fe last weekend; haven’t read it in years and am looking forward to rereading this old favorite from college.)
- Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy by Barry Ritholtz et al
And if you want to brush up on payments this summer, check out Glenbrook’s recommended list of payments industry reading here.
What’s on your summer reading list? Let us know in the comments.
In case you’ve been wondering where things stand with government bailout funds the WSJ has an interactive graphic. You can sort by program (Automotive Industry Financing Program, etc.), by recipient company, by date, by amount, etc.
(hat tip to Barry Ritholtz)
At Glenbrook we believe that B2B payments are among the most compelling opportunities in the payment industry today. Card acceptance is growing, yet businesses lack the tools to efficiently process transactions.
My colleague Carol Coye Benson and I recently published the findings from a series of interviews with business-to-business suppliers about credit card acceptance that we conducted earlier this year. Our goal for this reasearch was to determine:
- Whether they accept card payments from business buyers, how they think about this practice, and if they expect it to grow
- How easy it is to apply the incoming card payments using the company’s ERP or accounting package receivables module
- The supplier’s awareness of PCI-DSS and their compliance responsibilities
- The extent to which they are interested in using Software as a Service (SaaS) ERP and accounting solutions
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There are a lot of mobile payments companies – and a lot of prepaid/mobile combo products – that are focusing on person to person, or P2P payments. It’s not surprising – this is a payment domain still dominated by cash and check. Introducing a new P2P product also avoids all the messy complexities of terminals and the point of sale. Of course, the challenge in this domain has always been the business case – particularly for domestic P2P transfers. There hasn’t been a lot of evidence of consumer interest in paying to pay – or receive – payments from friends and family.
So it was particularly interesting to see an important incumbent in the P2P arena, CashEdge, step into the mobile P2P arena with their new product, POPmoney. CashEdge is a behind-the-scenes player that supplies banks with services to allow their customers to move money electronically. The Company started by enabling transfers from a customer’s account at one bank to the same customer’s account at another bank – so called “me-to-me” transfers. They have since expanded the offering to handle third party transactions (“me-to-you”). Several hundred banks are currently their clients, including seven of the largest ten banks. CashEdge transferred over $50 billion for banks in 2008.
Internet Retailer recently published the 2009 Edition of its Top 500 Guide, which provides profiles and statistics on “America’s 500 Largest Retail Web Sites”. eCommerce professionals look forward to its publication every June not only to see the relative rankings of the online retailers, and to also pick apart the shifting dynamics of the industry.
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Each year, Glenbrook attempts the impossible – to create a simple table showing U.S. payments system volumes, by both “amount” (dollar value) and “count” (number of transactions) – all mapped to payments domains. We use the term “domain” to refer to the purpose of the payment – so that purchases at the point of sale, bill payment, person-to-person payments, etc. are domains.
This year’s analysis, of calendar year 2008, again highlights areas of enormous opportunity for providers of payments systems and services. The sheer volume of checks still dominating the B2B payments domain is the most obvious – but there are other opportunities – such as for ACH at the point of sale – that are equally intriguing.
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Boku announced a new mobile payments product yesterday, along with a set of acquisitions, new funding, and a new management team. The offering is ambitious, and dead-set against the emerging global market for spontaneous purchases related to online gaming.
Niche, you say? I’m not so sure. There’s a lot to be interested in here. Of course, I may be biased – as a Francophile (at times openly, at times secretly), I like the wordplay. And strong, four letter payments brands seem to work…
Here’s what caught my eye:
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Last week Glenbrook conducted an “Opportunities in B2B Payments” workshop in New York City. Erin McCune and I led the workshop, which was attended by product strategists from card networks, NACHA, The Clearing House, major banks, processors, software and service providers and payments start-up companies. The group had significant experience in B2B payments and shared a common interest in understanding the “gating factors” that apparently constrain the rate at which B2B payments are moving from checks to electronics. (Today nearly three-quarters of B2B payments remain stubbornly paper check.)
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In an article titled Home Economics in today’s Sunday New York Times Magazine Virginia Heffernan examines how Mint.com has encouraged her to confront her spending patterns, save more, and reduce bank fees.
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Every now and then, I get brought in to trouble shoot a payments initiative gone awry. For the last week I was hunkered down in triage mode with a client team suffering from a derailed project. They were exhausted, drowning in user complaints, struggling to fix bugs, and disillusioned with their vendor.
I’ve thought long and hard on why projects fail and how to avoid disaster, and time and time again, there are opportunities to learn fresh lessons. In this particular case, rescue is on its way. We were successful in obtaining a commitment for additional resources and have senior management’s focus on the problem. We’ve identified root causes and outlined a game plan to get the project back on track. But its going to take many months of concerted effort by the team and consistent support from key stakeholders and senior executives to ensure that the new process and technology are successfully adopted.
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Last Friday, the Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge engine” went live. Steven Wolfram is the driving force behind this incredibly ambitious venture. His previous accomplishments include publication of first scientific paper at age 15, a PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech at age 20, creation of Mathematica software, and publication of “A New Kind of Science.”
The breadth of vision for Wolfram Alpha is striking:
Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
Source: Wolfram Alpha “About“
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Some of us payments geeks often lose sight of what merchants really want – they just want to sell more. Selling more stuff is like 10 times more important to them than saving money on their costs of payment acceptance.
Bill Me Later is but one recent example of merchants (online in this case) will to pay more to sell more – and, through the magic of margin, make higher profits on higher volume. BML’s promotional financing was the key to unlocking merchant acceptance – enabling a win/win for both the merchant and BML.
This morning I happened across this blog post about OpenTable (about ready to have its initial public offering). I was struck by the comment that “across 8,090 member restaurants, the average restaurant pays OpenTable $515 each month.” OpenTable helps those restaurants fill their tables – and gets paid accordingly. It’s a very convenient experience for the consumer too – I’ve been addicted to OpenTable since it first launched years ago!
Here’s a question: how does that average of $515/month that OpenTable earns compare to the money the average restaurant pays to its card acquirer? Not the full merchant discount – just the fees net of interchange. What do you think?
In a frankly depressing but undoubtedly realistic column this morning titled “National Addiction to Easy Credit Remains Consumers’ Downfall“, Michelle Singletary, the Washington Post’s personal finance columnist, writes that the credit card reforms being put into regulation by the Federal Reserve and potentially being accelerated/enhanced by Congressional action sometime soon won’t deal with the root cause of the problem of credit card debt.
She regrets that even after these reforms are in place that “people will still be able to swipe their way into massive debt in seconds — and it’s that ease of borrowing that has produced hundreds of thousands of credit addicts.” Some of us who spent years building the current card-based payments systems to be “faster than cash” might say that was the whole point of doing so wasn’t necessarily to help build credit card receivables but, rather, to help merchants and consumers quickly transact!
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Last week, Visa reported its second fiscal quarter financial results – and included a mention that Visa’s US debit card purchase volume in the fourth calendar quarter of 2008 slightly exceeded that of its US credit card purchase volume ($206 billion vs. $203 billion).
Today, in another press release, Visa reinforced that point.
Six years earlier, in 2002, the transactions on Visa debit cards in the US exceeded the transactions on Visa credit cards for the first time.
In fact, purchase volume on credit cards has been shrinking of late – with Fitch reporting today that spend volume at the top six issuers fell an average of 14.2% sequentially in the first quarter of 2009 and 14.0% year-over-year.
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MORNING SESSION #1 – Whew – what a whirlwind! Companies get 7 minutes to demo their products/services before the microphone is cut off. Some very interesting stuff flying by at warp speed (so please excuse the grammar/any typos)!
So here goes:
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