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Really Big Questions in Payments

Glenbrook’s Allen Weinberg wrote a few weeks ago about his view of the Grand Challenges in payments…. a daunting list, and one I agree with.  But I want to extend his discussion on one of his challenges:  “Realigned value chain economics in a push payment world”, and add two more: “What is the proper role […]

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Enough with the 2016 Predictions – Let’s Think Bigger!

As I was slogging through the many payments-related articles and blog posts reminiscing about 2015 events and making predictions for what may or may not be ahead in 2016, I thought of a conversation I had with Scott Loftesness around 20 years ago, sometime in 1995 or 1996. Both of us were at First Data […]

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Merchants Go on Offense in Digital Payments

The evolution of the digital wallet has seemed to accelerate in recent months, weeks and days, led, in my mind, by some important payment product launches by the retail community. These developments combine the long-standing heft and influence of America’s largest retailers with a seemingly more aggressive stance by these companies to both assert their […]

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EMV’s Not-Very-Even Distribution

At our Glenbrook Payments Boot Camps, we often quote futurist and novelist William Gibson’s 1993 remark that “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” in order to demonstrate that different payment methods take varying amounts of time to become commonplace. Over the last year and more, most boot camp attendees […]

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Merchant App Stores Today

In what seems quite a number of years ago, back in 2012, Merchant Warehouse (now Cayan), announced what I think was the first “Merchant App Store”, marketed as the Genius Customer Engagement Platform. Running on a somewhat traditional Verifone MX915 terminal, it was an early forerunner to the current iOS and Android-powered tablet-based offerings. I […]

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The eGovernment – ePayment Conundrum

The interdependence of eGovernment and government ePayments is yet another classic payment chicken and egg challenge. As we work with governments to build their electronic payment strategies we sometimes need to temper their expectations given this all-too-familiar challenge. There have to be enough digitally delivered government services to warrant digital payment infrastructure, but you also […]

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EMV - Necessary, Insufficient, and our Lasting PR Risk

We are just a month away from the October EMV liability shift and the transition is, to no one’s surprise, mostly incomplete. EMV credit card issuance is expected to be at just 50% by the end of this year. Point of sale hardware upgrades at major retailers may be in place but the long tail of SMB […]

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More on Change at the Point of Sale

Glenbrookers are often asked to contribute their thoughts on payment trends. Co-founder Allen Weinberg is no exception. Here’s his take on the latest trends at the point of sale as he shared it with TSYS’ n>genuity journal.   What is happening at the point of sale, and why is it so important? There are a […]

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Disruption and Innovation at the Point of Sale

Surprising disruptions and unanticipated consequences abound in payments. Sometimes, it’s just a rule change that makes all the difference. In 2001, the NACHA rule enabling ad hoc web debits was put in place, primarily at the behest of banks who wanted to make it easier for their cardholders to pay their credit card bills. Great […]

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Mobile Payments – What Entrepreneurs Need to Know

Recorded about a month ago by VC firm Matrix Partners, Glenbrook’s Scott Loftesness and Dana Stalder of Matrix Partners discuss the evolution of mobile payments, the business model failure of Softcard, and other topics including: The 8+ year journey to ApplePay Technologies here to stay: NFC, tokenization, and biometrics What it all means for the Networks […]

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Square's $Cashtag. Smart. Very Smart.

Smart. Very Smart. I applaud Square’s introduction of “$Cashtags” for a number of reasons. First, some of you may know that I am a bit of a nut when it comes to brand names in payments – I think it is incredibly important that the sending and receiving party both know/understand the word being used […]

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New POS Security from Old System Topology

Anyone around technology for a couple of decades recognizes how old ideas tend to return. To those folks, using a browser to do data entry into an enterprise database looks a lot like a mini or mainframe system’s terminal application. Back for another incarnation in payments is an old fashioned topology familiar to anyone who […]

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ApplePay, NFC, QR (Oh My!) and the New POS

First There is a Mountain, Then There is No Mountain, Then There is… I’ve been thinking about what the future of the point of sale environment will look like from a consumer perspective. Of course, 10 years ago, we all knew what it was going to look like: consumers tapping their mobile phones to Near […]

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Out of Africa: Watching the Evolution of Mobile Money

It turns out you don’t have to be unbanked to like M-Pesa I had the opportunity earlier this month to visit the mecca of mobile payments, which –with all due respect to the recent accomplishments in Cupertino — remains Nairobi, Kenya. The “Kenyan miracle” in payments has been well documented, particularly in terms of how […]

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Apple Pay Stirs, But Doesn't Shake, the Mobile Landscape

The Apple Pay announcement finally came yesterday and the company’s orchestration of much of the complex and fractious card payments ecosystem demonstrates Apple’s insight into how the current payments ecosystem works and how it must be aligned in order to meet its own needs. Combining NFC, Apple’s Passbook wallet, Touch ID biometric reader, cards stored in the […]