Anyone even vaguely conscious during Sunday afternoon football games has seen adverts for Visa Checkout, that shopping cart checkout assistant the card network is encouraging everyone—cardholders, issuers, and merchants—to adopt. Visa is not alone. MasterCard’s MasterPass and American Express Checkout are similar product offerings all meant to add convenience and security to the merchant’s checkout flow.
These checkout assistants—you could even stretch the definition a bit and think of them as wallets—use the payment tokenization specification from EMVCo. But as products from competitive networks, each has unique attributes, never mind its own APIs specification.
Glenbrook’s Russ Jones takes us for a pretty deep dive into how these tools work. And the benefits they provide to merchants especially in mobile commerce. Russ has been under the hood and this is a report on what he’s found.
George, founder of Glenbrook’s Payments on Fire® podcast, is a 20-year payments industry veteran with a background in founding and running IT-based businesses to help clients develop payments strategies. During his 10 years at Glenbrook, George focused heavily on consulting in competitive positioning, technology investment road mapping, and innovation. Before joining Glenbrook, George led teams at Aberdeen Group, Mercator Advisory Group, and several other companies he founded, including Payment Pathways, RapidNet, and DigiFlite. George retired in 2024, but his contributions to Glenbrook live on through the 175+ episodes of Payments on Fire he recorded during his tenure.