Who knows what in payments? Sounds like a question begging for a snappy one-liner comeback. But this is a question we hear more and more from our clients. Particularly those that see the increasingly close relationship between payments and marketing — and want to better understand how the targeting of ads and offers can be [...]
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Over the winter break, Verizon announced (and then retracted) that it would begin to charge customers a $2.00 convenience fee in 2012 to pay their monthly bill online or over the phone — except in a multitude of cases “where the fee is waived or where no fee applies”. Huh? That’s what we said, too. [...]
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Thanks to the hard work of many (Google, Citi, Sprint, MasterCard, etc.), NFC-based mobile payments are finally a reality in the United States ––and I’m super excited about… mobile self-checkout. I don’t have anything against NFC mobile payments, but the payments industry is already almost a decade into this “next big thing” and is still, [...]
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Every so often, we can be witnesses to disruptive innovation in action. It’s exciting when it happens – for those who see it. Alas, most don’t see it – although they will eventually. Which pair of glasses are you peering through? For those who can see it, there’s disruptive innovation in action at the moment [...]
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I’m always excited about Apple announcements – and today’s announcement of the iPad 2 was just the latest example. What was the keyword of the day today? It was Post-PC. The world of the iPad (and the iPhone and the iPod) is the world of Post-PC. As payments geeks, can we envision our world evolving [...]
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In a VeriFone press release today titled “VeriFone Says Merchant Buy-In Key to Success of Mobile Commerce“, VeriFone CEO Doug Bergeron outlined six “rules” that he said “industry participants need to adhere to in order to ensure success of mobile commerce.” Bergeron’s rules are a good start at what the payments industry needs to consider [...]
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In one of my prior lives, I made the phone call that triggered what eventually became the industry standard for chip card deployment now known as EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa). That call was made almost 20 years ago. At the time, I was at Visa where we were spending a lot of energy on the development of [...]
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I’m sure you’ve seen it – there’s been so much “buzz” in the press over the last few weeks about mobile payments. Yet, in our partners’ meeting at Glenbrook earlier this week, I told my colleagues that if I knew of a way to short “mobile payments”, I’d be all over it. Follow along as [...]
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What Drives Innovation? More often than not, the successful innovations that surprise us come from disrupters who focus in a laser-like way on unserved market opportunities. In doing so, they are able to successfully fly below the radar of the incumbents (to use Christensen’s familiar terminology). The incumbents, after all, have a laser-like focus on [...]
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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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At Glenbrook, we think (and teach!) about the payments industry by domains (the purpose of the payment) and players (users and providers). Our quick take on the impact of yesterday’s proposed rules on each is below. One general assumption I’ve made here is that the gap between debit interchange from big banks, and from smaller [...]
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Last June, in an article titled “The End of Interchange“, I wrote about the then yet to be passed Durbin amendment – and how it might affect debit interchange fees. Earlier today, we got the first glimpse. The point of my earlier article was focused on the “sleeper” – as I described it – in [...]
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In a post titled “Great since day one“, Marco Arment blogs about what makes the iPhone different – in essence he writes that Apple makes products that are great today. Android isn’t. Reading his post brought to mind the fragmented nature of the card payments ecosystem that we live in – and how it’s so [...]
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There, did I get your attention? … Tonight’s headlines say it even more clearly – see this Wall St. Journal story titled “Merchants Win Debit-Card Fee Battle“. Or, see this post on PaymentsNews.com about the Durbin compromise announced earlier today. Seriously, it seems to me that there’s a bit of a sleeper buried in all [...]
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I’ve been amazed by what I’ve been reading of late from the “analyst” firms commenting on the Durbin Amendment. A lot of what I’ve seen makes me wonder whether these folks should turn in their analyst licenses and simply register as paid lobbyists for their big bank clientele. (The Durbin amendment, for those not in [...]
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