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...
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...
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...
As new forms of digital payments begin to take hold, the old assumptions no longer work. What does it mean to issue a card when there is no card? How can transactions be risk-managed when payments credentials are masked and scrambled by design? And what is the...
You may have heard about the Reserve Bank of India’s decision to create a new category of “payments banks”. Recently, the Reserve Bank of India approved 11 applicant institutions (out of 41 who had applied) to start the process of becoming licensed. The group...
One of the fun things we do at Glenbrook is help clients think through product concepts in financial services, commerce, and payments. An intriguing area that I’ve been thinking about and watching closely over the years is voice-activated purchasing. My interest in...
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...
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,...
The news from Target, increasing the number of cards compromised to 70 million and the expansion of data loss to mailing and email addresses, phone numbers, and names, affirms that we’re in a security crisis. As my colleague Scott Loftesness puts it, card data is,...
The arrest of eight in New York who participated in a global $45 million ATM cash-out attack revealed, once again, some hard truths about the cyber security posture of financial systems and the enterprises that operate essential payment infrastructure. First, the...
