Last week in Geneva, the ITU wrapped up a two-year project - the "Focus Group on Digital Financial Services and Financial Inclusion". Several hundred organizations and people participated in the Focus Group, which produced research papers and policy recommendations...
Anyone who’s been in a Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp session with me has heard me emphatically stress that merchants “just want to sell stuff – they don’t want to be in the payments business”. Of course many larger and more sophisticated merchants have figured out...
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...
Today, Glenbrook celebrates its 15th birthday. It’s been quite a journey - an amazing one in so many ways - yet it also sometimes feels like we’re still on Day One! There’s so much happening in payments - and, more broadly, in commerce, financial inclusion, and...
Visa’s CEO recently reported that more than 750,000 locations, representing 17% of the U.S. face-to-face card-accepting merchant base, are accepting EMV chip cards. While everyone in the industry agrees that it will be quite a while before the numbers reach...
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”,...
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...
2015 has been an exciting, tumultuous year for payments. Our once "under the radar" industry now makes for daily headline news with stories and commentary (some breathtakingly uninformed) on new ways to pay, M&A activity, regulatory actions, competitive...
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...
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...
