What a year it has been! Twelve months ago, there were still people in our industry who didn’t know what Bitcoin was. There were still people who believed that EMV would roll out in the U.S. just like it did in the U.K. There were still people who thought that the...
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...
Who knows what in payments? Sounds like a question begging for a snappy one-liner comeback. But this is a question we hear more and more from our clients. Particularly those that see the increasingly close relationship between payments and marketing -- and want to...
Over the winter break, Verizon announced (and then retracted) that it would begin to charge customers a $2.00 convenience fee in 2012 to pay their monthly bill online or over the phone -- except in a multitude of cases "where the fee is waived or where no fee...
Thanks to the hard work of many (Google, Citi, Sprint, MasterCard, etc.), NFC-based mobile payments are finally a reality in the United States ––and I’m super excited about… mobile self-checkout. I don’t have anything against NFC mobile payments, but the payments...
Every so often, we can be witnesses to disruptive innovation in action. It’s exciting when it happens - for those who see it. Alas, most don’t see it - although they will eventually. Which pair of glasses are you peering through? For those who can see it, there’s...
I'm always excited about Apple announcements - and today's announcement of the iPad 2 was just the latest example. What was the keyword of the day today? It was Post-PC. The world of the iPad (and the iPhone and the iPod) is the world of Post-PC. As payments geeks,...
In a VeriFone press release today titled "VeriFone Says Merchant Buy-In Key to Success of Mobile Commerce", VeriFone CEO Doug Bergeron outlined six "rules" that he said "industry participants need to adhere to in order to ensure success of mobile commerce." Bergeron's...
In one of my prior lives, I made the phone call that triggered what eventually became the industry standard for chip card deployment now known as EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa). That call was made almost 20 years ago. At the time, I was at Visa where we were spending a...
I’m sure you’ve seen it - there’s been so much “buzz” in the press over the last few weeks about mobile payments. Yet, in our partners' meeting at Glenbrook earlier this week, I told my colleagues that if I knew of a way to short "mobile payments", I'd be all over it....
