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Hostility in Payments

The recent entry of Amazon.com into the small merchant mobile POS card acceptance market may signal the last phase of increasing hostility in the US merchant acquiring segment of the card payments business. Prior to the launch of Square in 2010, the merchant acquiring business in the US might have been described as having some […]

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Full SEPA is Here, At Last

This week, we are delighted to feature a post by Manfred Schuck, a payments consultant from Frankfurt.  Manfred will co-lead with Elizabeth McQuerry our upcoming Payments in Europe Insight workshop to be held in Mountain View, CA on October 9.  On January 1st, 2001 fifteen European countries introduced notes and coins of a new common […]

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Bitcoin and Payments Survey 2014

We’re at it again. We’re conducting our second annual Bitcoin and Payments Survey. Please participate! The survey takes about 7 minutes, maybe less. Do it from your smartphone while you’re waiting in the market’s check-out line or on the sofa using your tablet. The survey is mobile friendly.

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What the BRICS Tell Us About Payments

As the leaders of the BRICS group of nations gather this week in Brazil (now that the World Cup crowds are gone), I’ve asked myself if that meeting has any important implications for payments. The BRICS moniker is often applied to a group of countries that share the characteristics large, young populations and high economic […]

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Learnings from the Bitcoin Workshop

Bryan Derman and I led Glenbrook’s second Bitcoin: Basics and Beyond workshop a couple of weeks go, this time in NYC from the 22nd floor board room of the Downtown Conference Center, a great space (the staff took great care of us, too, thank you). As with every Glenbrook workshop—especially with our smaller Insight workshops on […]

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MCX - Now I Get It!

In various venues — our Payments Bootcamp, our private client sessions or our merchant group meetings — we have talked a lot about MCX, the Merchant Customer Exchange initiative, created by a number of the largest US retailers to establish a merchant-centric wallet and payments solution. In these discussions, I’ve often joked about the name, […]

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Who's the Better Fraud Investigator Survey — What about Merchants?

Our Card Fraud survey is still open — we’re trying to answer the question of who first detects card fraud: cardholders or their banks? The survey can be found here. I’ve received a couple of comments suggesting I left out an important fraud detector in the survey: merchants! In the card not present (CNP) space, […]

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The Fed Gets Some Mojo?

Faster Payments May Get Here Faster than We Thought Some of you may know that I’ve been an ardent advocate for a faster-payments infrastructure in the United States. I’ve been closely following the Fed’s process towards payments system improvements. On Thursday in San Francisco, I attended one of the Town Hall meetings they’ve been holding to […]

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Who’s a Better Fraud Investigator — You or Your Bank?

We often get interesting questions about payments, and the latest one stumped us: “How many credit and debit fraudulent uses are first detected by the bank? By the customer?” We don’t know the answer to that one ­­or of any good source for this data ­­ so we thought we’d ask you, members of the […]

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It's Not About Payments

I just attended NACHA’s Council for Electronic Billing and Payments and I’ve come away with an even firmer opinion that this payments business I’m in isn’t about payments. It’s about data. A retail payment transaction has the potential to throw off a lot of valuable information: what you bought, what you bought along with it, […]

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The South Korean Card Market’s Fascinating Structure

My partner, Bryan Derman, and I just returned from a week in South Korea and a deep immersion in the local card market. As consultants serving clients across the globe—including payments -related companies in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia—we are repeatedly reminded of the remarkable differences between adjacent countries in any given region.  A […]

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What's Your GPA?

As a biller or merchant, you are vitally concerned about your payments “back office”, that set of core functions involved with accepting consumer payments. Whether you are in Treasury or Technology, if you are concerned with payments, you are asking yourself, every day, questions such as: Is my organization optimized to manage payments? Am I […]

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Back from the Future: Bitcoin2014 Musings

Last week I was in Amsterdam for the second annual conference hosted by the The Bitcoin Foundation. As a strategist and advocate for ever-better payment solutions, I was very curious to learn how the Bitcoin protocol and its emerging enablers can address some of the most intractable challenges facing payments. For the most part, payments […]

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There Is No Such Thing As An International Wire

As globalization increases, businesses of all sizes buy goods and services from overseas suppliers and turn to new customers in overseas markets to drive growth. As a result, the demand for cross-border transactions steadily increases. The vast majority of these transactions takes place through correspondent banking relationships and collectively described as “international wires.” The reality […]

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Square Grapples with the Payments “Poultry Problem”

Bilateral Adoption Claims Another Victim Word came earlier this week that Square had sunset its consumer-facing app, Square Wallet.  The app had pioneered one of the great parlor tricks in payments, enabling a merchant using the Square Register POS app to recognize the presence of a Square Wallet consumer in its store and allow that […]