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...
Here are some thoughts on big actions that industry incumbents could take to strengthen their positions and the U.S. payments industry. What do these ideas have in common? First of all, they are infrastructural or market-wide. Secondly, they all ask one or more...
When I was a baby consultant some twenty years ago, I remember standing in Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park (remember book stores?) thumbing through a paperback book called "The Rules of Marketing". Rule #7 that said all successful markets will subdivide into...
Point of sale (POS) steering isn't really part of the payments industry dialogue right now as various stakeholders praise, argue, and criticize the proposed Federal Reserve rules on debit card interchange and network routing. But, I think it could be a big part of...
After months of speculation and hand-wringing, last Friday we finally got a relatively complete reading on how the Federal Reserve will likely implement the prescribed regulation of debit interchange and debit network competition. My partner, Carol Benson, has also...
While I don’t manage to attend every year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s annual payment conference remains one of my favorites. The Chicago Fed has a great payments team that works hard at putting together a timely program, but I like this event because it...
A number of us self-proclaimed “payments geeks” awoke this morning to learn of Visa Inc’s intention to purchase CyberSource for approximately $2 billion. Over the course of the day, Glenbrook’s been getting a flood of emails generally asking, “What’s the REAL...
Where are you? What did you buy? How much did you pay? Did you get a deal? This might sound like your teenager on their phone, but it's what a new company called Blippy hopes to answer with a new Web 2.0 service. Here's the basic premise. What if you could...
Today's announcement of American Express acquiring Revolution Money caught many of us industry pundits by surprise - especially given the $300 MM price tag that Amex paid for the deal. But, upon reflection, and after listening to the Q&A section of Amex's...
I jumped at the opportunity to interview Jason Hogg, CEO of Revolution Money, parent company of Revolution Card. My colleagues and I at Glenbrook Partners are frequently tapped as a source of information about the very latest goings on in the world of “alternative...
