After months of speculation and hand-wringing, last Friday we finally got a relatively complete reading on how the Federal Reserve will likely implement the prescribed regulation of debit interchange and debit network competition. My partner, Carol Benson, has also shared a summary of how various payment domains and players might be affected in the near [...]
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Last week my partner Russ Jones and I were exploring some of new ideas in the mobile payments space when we came across the notion of the “Commerce Context” – defined as when you and I, as consumers, are in an environment (a context) that’s enabled for commerce. The last fifteen years of the eCommerce [...]
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If you’ve been following along, you know that I’m just back from a week in Europe. Before heading over, I took the extra precaution of calling a couple of my card issuers to let them know I was going to be traveling – in the hopes that my primary debit and credit cards would continue [...]
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The dramatic vote on the Durbin amendment is causing panic, again, among retail bankers – who were last shocked by the Fed’s overdraft ruling. I wrote about that in November (Watch Out! Big Changes in Retail Bank Pricing Are Coming). I think the underlying problem that banks are dealing with is that too much of [...]
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I was particularly interested in the merchant funded rewards session put on by Jonathan Silver of Affinity Solutions and John MacMillan from Comerica Bank. Having listened to several discussions point to debit card rewards as important to consumers, this session focused on how to develop compelling rewards programs. First of all, rewards need to be [...]
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On the heels of our own Payments Views post The End of Cards as We Knew Them? have come interesting comments on the acceptance challenges facing US consumers using magnetic stripe cards overseas.
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Note: this commentary could be subtitled: “How my trip to the U.K. left me with a chip on my shoulder!” When I was a child, I remember preparing for international travel by accompanying my parents to our local bank branch to purchase traveler’s checks. It wasn’t exactly convenient – but they felt safer traveling with [...]
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… and Why ‘Decoupled Debit’ Could Change All That I was fascinated to read that Bank of America is now including debit cards in its card payment business line. Now, for anyone outside of our payments industry, this sounds absolutely reasonable. But from inside the industry, it’s pretty strange. The financial services industry, presumably like [...]
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Fresh off raising another $42 million of star-studded (Goldman Sachs this time) venture capital, Steve Case and Jason Hogg came to the NACHA Payments 2009 conference today to tell the banking world about their payments “Revolution”. Apart from reiterating last week’s deal with Chase Paymentech (bringing potential acceptance to 650,000 merchant locations and websites), not [...]
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Today, Citi announced a new Visa credit card program called Citi Forward. Interestingly, as part of its launch, Citi is using Twitter as one of its channels. Perhaps the partnership with MySpace for a version of Citi Forward is the reason? Other issuers we’re aware of also using Twitter include Discover and Bank of America [...]
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