IBAN the Terrible and Other EU Payment Issues

As the summer holiday period close, I find myself in a back to school mode even though I haven’t been enrolled for nearly twenty years. Europe is especially on my mind as we prepare for the Glenbrook Payments in Europe workshop next month. What are the big payments...

Who’s a Better Fraud Investigator — You or Your Bank?

We often get interesting questions about payments, and the latest one stumped us: “How many credit and debit fraudulent uses are first detected by the bank? By the customer?” We don’t know the answer to that one ­­or of any good source for this data...

There Is No Such Thing As An International Wire

As globalization increases, businesses of all sizes buy goods and services from overseas suppliers and turn to new customers in overseas markets to drive growth. As a result, the demand for cross-border transactions steadily increases. The vast majority of these...

How to Get Along and Do Good

Recently I shared my views about the developments underway in the mobile and payments space in Latin America. In that story, I address how individual countries are taking big strides toward reshaping their national payments landscape. Another remarkable, and equally...

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...