Glenbrook Innovation

Creative Tension Shapes the Fintech-Bank Ecosystem

In my last post I covered the proliferation of challenger banks, the mobile-first, digital-only neo-banks and what differentiates them from the incumbents. While the media lens is usually focused on the front-end, the user experience, I’m always curious about what’s powering these operations under the hood. From the traditional banks’ perspective, fintech companies are just […]

Glenbrook

The Apple Card May Not be Revolutionary—But It Offers a Thoughtful Bundle of Features and a Glimpse into the Post-Card Era

Apple’s March 25th keynote event announced forthcoming offerings to further build out Apple’s Services line—video media streaming, print media subscriptions, gaming, and more. Most interesting to us at Glenbrook (surprise!) was Apple’s co-branded credit card launched in partnership with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard. The Apple Card, to be released in the summer, integrates consumer controls, […]

Regulation

Madness in Marijuana Payments - Part 2

Since my April 2018 post, there’s been a lot of activity in the “land of weed.” Multiple countries and U.S. states have moved toward legalization. Major non-cannabis industries are investing heavily in cannabis related products and cannabis-based companies. With U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions out, his strict stance against marijuana perhaps no longer holding, many are […]

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Payments 2017 – One Month In

Business evolution—whether it’s automotive, bioscience, or in the payments industry—proceeds along a predictable path of incremental improvements and optimization. Until it doesn’t and a step function takes effect. Last year was sleepy compared to what we can expect during the next eleven months. 2016 was characterized by the more familiar path, through themes set in […]

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Two Paths for Faster

The always-interesting Federal Reserve Bank Chicago Payments Symposium just closed, and predictably, a lot of the discussion (and argument!) was around “faster” – the evolving progress of the United States towards improvements in our payments systems. I was particularly interested in hearing other people’s views on the outlook for this in our country. I came […]

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Incredible India!

Photo: Scott Loftesness   A few weeks ago I joined my client Raj Jain, CEO of RS Software, for my third visit to India. RS Software is headquartered in Kolkata which was our first stop for the annual general meeting of shareholders. After that, we visited Mumbai and Bangalore – along the way we met […]

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Merchant Acceptance in the Developing World – Mobile Payments’ Essential Missing Link

Over the past several years, my colleagues and I at Glenbrook have been working on a variety of projects focused on bringing low-cost financial services to the poor in developing countries. While there has been a lot written on how mobile or eMoney payments systems such as M-PESA in Kenya have grown in many developing […]

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What’s Next for US Payments

We’ve spent so much time the past several years obsessing about how mobile proximity payments would be deployed in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world. Now we know. This week, Apple Pay celebrates the first anniversary of its launch, and a new generation of payment-enabled iPhones will be announced. Later this month, […]

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A Different Type of Start Up: Payments in Afghanistan

Imagine a country where less than 10% of the adult population has a bank account and only about half of those account holders have a debit card. Credit cards are virtually non-existent. There are only a couple dozen banks in the whole country. Cash truly is king. Now imagine decades-long political and sectarian conflict that […]

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A Central Bank Takes on Mobile Payments

Ecuador’s Central Bank has embarked on an ambitious course to launch an affordable and widely available mobile payment scheme.  In fact, it will be the national wallet. With some uncertainty, it appears that Ecuador’s initiative may be the second central bank effort to enter this space. Jordan’s central bank has launched “JoMoPay”, but for those […]

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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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Plaid - A Modern API for Card Data

Our work in payment data cuts across many areas. Who has what data? How is it best monetized? How can it be put to use for better decision making? How can it be augmented and enhanced. It’s in this last area of “enhancements” that we’ve become fascinated with a new startup company called Plaid. They […]

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The State of Payments: 2014

What a year it has been! Twelve months ago, there were still people in our industry who didn’t know what Bitcoin was. There were still people who believed that EMV would roll out in the U.S. just like it did in the U.K. There were still people who thought that the developing world would build […]

Tags: state of payments

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The Mobile Wallet Wars of 2014

Our clients are starting to ask us who we think is going to win the mobile wallet war in 2014. Questions like: What’s happening with the Isis rollout? What’s the next likely step in the evolution of the Google Wallet? Is PayPal’s In-Store initiative getting any consumer adoption? All of these questions are predicated on […]

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Money2020: Impressions & Observations

I’ve nearly recovered from the payments overload that was Money2020 last week in Las Vegas – it was initially exhilarating, then incredibly exhausting, but I had a fantastic time. Here’s my admittedly subjective take based on having attended only two sessions (one of which I moderated) and stood in the back for only part of […]