Drew Edmond Glenbrook Merchants Payments Views

Merchant Payments Operations: Reporting and Analytics

In Kavita Jiandani’s post Assessing a Merchant’s Payments Operations, she introduced Glenbrook’s methodology for our in-depth assessment of a merchant’s payments operations. In her introductory piece, Kavita highlights the major Key Assessment Areas we evaluate during each engagement. In this Payments Views entry, I continue with a focus on one of the Key Assessment Areas: […]

Glenbrook

Prepaid Power and Financial Inclusion at Fintech South

Georgia is a nexus of global payment processing and merchant acquiring activity. Some two-thirds of all U.S. purchase volume is processed there. That’s a lot of debit and credit card transactions. But what are those same companies doing to improve payments for the underbanked? That combination of payments technology and financial inclusion concerns was the […]

Russ Jones

The Five Biggest Trends in Payments

All of the 2019 prediction stories got me thinking about the mega trends in the payments industry. These are the year-over-year tectonic shifts in the industry that you can bet your company’s strategy on — maybe even bet your career on. In a landscape of trees, this is what the forest looks like. Trend #1 […]

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Innovation, Fragmentation in Cross-border and Real-time Payments

I’ve just returned from SIBOS 2017, the annual SWIFT convening of global transaction banks and all things associated with cross-border payment. And right now I’m in flight, heading to the payments industry grail otherwise known as Money 20/20 USA, getting ready to moderate a cool event on Wednesday morning. Oooph, this industry’s fall conference season […]

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Is Amazon Best-in-Class for Online Payments?

Amazon.com is in the news all the time with its continued expansion of markets and fulfillment centers, its focus on innovation and long term R&D, and, recently, some very non-intuitive acquisitions. It’s easy to get swept up in their story. But when a company gets as big and powerful as Amazon has become, it’s helpful […]

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Two Remarkable Women - And the Mobile Payments Systems They Have Built

I had the good fortune last week to be part of the Glenbrook team attending the FinTechStage Inclusion Forum in Jakarta. Happily, among the attendees were two women I have known for several years: Maha Bahou of the Central Bank of Jordan and Carolina Trivelli of Pagos Digitales Peruanos. Peru and Jordan are two of […]

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Demonetization Roulette: India’s unusual approach to creating a cashless economy

On November 8, 2016, India cancelled 86% of its currency in circulation with a four-hour notice and the move pushed India into a severe currency shortage. In a country where 98% of all consumer payments are in cash, this prolonged currency shortage carries risks: economic destabilization in the short term and irrevocable damages to the […]

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Demystifying India’s Digital Payment Infrastructure

There is a growing curiosity about India’s payments systems. These systems, and their role in the “India stack”, have been the subject of many articles speculating their importance in shaping India’s future. Despite this attention, there is still considerable confusion about what these initiatives are, and how they interact with each other. This led me […]

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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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Money20/20 Wrap-up

We’ve seen a lot of innovation in payment initiation over the last few years. Apple Pay, Android Pay, Walmart Pay and their like have filled Payments News headline stories. But this year, at Money20/20, consumer-facing innovation downshifted to a lower gear. And that’s a good thing. Getting Down to Work “Mobile” news cooled because the […]

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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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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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My Half Life in Payments

Earlier this year, I was invited to keynote a conference in Sydney – something I always enjoy doing.  The conference sponsor wanted me to talk about disruptions, about how successful innovations in payments come into the world, and to provide a look inside Silicon Valley’s innovation culture.  I took the opportunity to do all of […]

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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, […]