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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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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 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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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 […]

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Transactions Get Smart

Glenbrook held a great “Innovations in Payments” workshop this week – a group which energetically debated many topics, including Bitcoin (of course), tokenization, beacons, authentication, wearables, interoperability and mobile ad spend. As I reflect on the day, it seems that an interesting theme emerged.  Many of the topics were about payment transactions that are – or […]

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Merchants and Billers: Leverage = Options x Time!

Every three years or so, merchants and billers have an opportunity to reconsider their card processing agreements with their acquirers. This is an opportunity to negotiate lower rates — especially if business is booming – and also the time that a merchant or biller could consider changing to another service provider. Sadly, many merchants and […]

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Dennis Moser on Merchant Payments Complexity

Dennis Moser is Glenbrook’s payments systems expert.  He’s worked on building the engines that make payment networks run, especially the critical component of the POS and payment acceptance infrastructure.  He’s also been neck deep in payment data management systems, both as a designer and as a data mining practitioner. Dennis and I have worked together […]

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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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EMV, Data Breaches, HCE and the Pace of Change in Payments

One of the pleasures of joining Glenbrook has been getting to know what and how the other Glebrookers think about what’s happening in the payments industry.  We talk a lot at Glenbrook. Over iChat, email, mobile phones, Skype, Google Hangout with voice and video, through Google Docs, and whenever we meet up for client work […]

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Is the Target Breach the Chernobyl of Payments?

Chernobyl is certainly at the top of the list of man-made disasters.  In light of recent events, I’ve been thinking that the Target breach has become the Chernobyl of the payments world. As a group, we Americans never thought that much about payment security – we really didn’t have to.  We are protected by federal […]

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Dispatch from the Smart Card Alliance Payments Conference

For those companies and individuals most committed to building the EMV and NFC ecosystems, the place to be February 3rd through 7th was Salt Lake City where the Smart Card Alliance hosted both an EMV Migration Forum meeting and its annual Payments Summit.  Over 525 people attended, representing the chip industry, payment processors, card brands, […]

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A Deposit By Any Other Name?

What’s the difference between card acceptance and a deposit? In both cases, money is being delivered into a merchant’s bank account – in fact, a purist would point out that a deposit actually is the last stage of card acceptance for a merchant. But consider instead a different kind of deposit – something that is […]